242 CONCLUSION. 



but mistaken idea of the cataclysmal and revolutionary in 

 the past history of the globe. There can be no true notion 

 of nature or of nature's requirements so long as her facts 

 are Tie wed through the medium of the miraculous or abnor- 

 mal ; and it were greatly to be desired that in social and 

 moral, as well as in natural science, we should learn to re- 

 cognise in every instance the fixity and unerring operation 

 of Law, and so cease to ascribe to the blind deity of Fate 

 what our own knowledge ought to teach us to avoid and 

 enable us to avert. Nor let it be thought, we again repeat, 

 that by so doing we place a wider distance between the 

 Creator and his works, or that any knowledge of this kind 

 has a tendenc}^ to self-sufficiency and irreverence. Law is 

 but the mode in which the Creator has chosen to manifest 

 himself in his works, and the highest attainment of reason 

 is to give intelligible expression to these modes, so that 

 we may be enabled to determine their courses and antici- 

 pate their results. For this purpose I have endeavoured, 

 throughout the preceding review, to group and associate 

 facts, and therefrom to deduce such generalisations as seem 

 warranted by the teachings of Palaeontology. Where the 

 objects of research are so fragmentary and obscure, where 

 so few of the innumerable forms entombed in the crust of 

 the globe can have yet been exhumed, and where so little 

 has been done in distant regions to discover and identify 

 contemporaneous formations, I am fully aware how provi- 

 sional and temporary such generalisations must necessarily 

 be. In the mean time, however, they serve as centres 

 round which to marshal new facts, and they give consist- 

 ency to what might otherwise appear a mass of heterogene- 

 ous and not unfrequently contradictory details. 



And speaking of facts, I would here, in the name of 

 Palaeontology, solicit that assistance which lies, less or 

 more, in the power of every one to afford. The objects of 



