XXIV. HUGH MILLER. 



continuing to exist for mile after mile, grows dwarfish and 

 stunted, and finally disappears, giving place to rushes and 

 other aquatic grasses, till the lacustrine has entirely dis- 

 placed the marine flora. From these two important facts, — 

 the existence of the fragment of Asterolepis in the lower flag- 

 stones of the Orkneys, and of the " curiously mixed semi- 

 marine, semi-lacustrine vegetation in the Loch of Stennis," 

 which our author regards as bearing directly on the develop- 

 ment hypothesis, — he takes occasion to submit that hypothesis 

 to a severe examination, and to point out its consequences, 

 — ^its incompatibility with the great truths of morality and 

 revealed religion. According to Professor Oken, one of the 

 ablest supporters of the development theory, " there are two 

 kinds of generation in the world, — the creation proper, 

 and the propagation that is sequent thereon, or the original 

 and secondary generation. Consequently, no organism has 

 been created of larger size than an infusorial point. No or- 

 ganism is, or ever has been created, which is not microscopic. 

 Whatever is large has not been created, but developed. Man 

 has not been created, but developed." Hence it follows that 

 during the great geological period, when race after race was 

 destroyed, and new forms of life called into being, " nature 

 had been pregnant with the human race," and that immor- 

 tal and intellectual Man is but the development of the Brute, 

 — ^itself the development of some monad or mollusc, which 

 has been smitten into life by the action of electricity upon 

 a portion of gelatinous matter. 



If the development theory be true, " the early fossils ought 

 to be very small in size," and " very low in organization." 

 In the earliest strata we ought to find only " mere embryos 

 Sind/oetuses ; and if we find instead the/ullrgrown and mature, 

 then must we hold that the testimony of geology is not only 

 not in accordance with the theory, but in positive opposition 

 to it." Having laid this down as the principle by which the 



