44 EXPLANATIONS. 



cisely at the point where his retrospect happened 

 then to terminate."* 



It is exactly to such theorizers as the Edinburgh 

 reviewer that this rebuke is applicable. When he 

 asserts the contemporaneousness of the highest 

 moUusks with the origin of organic life, he says 

 — " We are describing phenomena that we have 

 seen. We have spent years of active life among 

 these ancient strata — looking for (and we might 

 say longing for) some arrangement of the ancient 

 fossils which might fall in with our preconceived 

 notions of a natural ascending scale. But we 

 looked in vain, and we were weak enough to 

 bow to nature." The weakness consisted in 

 looking only in one little portion of the earth, 

 and believing it to be a criterion for all the 

 rest. This writer seems yet to have to learn 

 that knowledge is to be acquired by com- 

 munication as well as examination. Were a 

 philosopher (supposing there could be such a 

 being) to limit his view of mankind to juvenile 

 schools, he might with equal rationality deny 

 that there is any such thing in the world as 

 infants in arms. "We speak of what we have 

 seen," he might say, " and, finding no specimens 

 * Travels in North Americ, ii. 131. 



