HUGH MILLER. XXXllL 



Viewing this olive leaf of the Old Red Sandstone as not at 

 all devoid of poetry, our author invites us to a voyage from 

 the latest formation up to the first zone of the Silurian for- 

 mation, thus passing from ancient to still more ancient scenes 

 of being, and finding, as at the commencement of our voy- 

 age, a graceful intermixture of land and water, continent, 

 river, and sea. 



But though the existence of a true placoid, a real verte- 

 brated fish, in the Cambrian Limestone of Bala, and of true 

 wood at the base of the Old Red Sandstone, are utterly in- 

 compatible with the development hypothesis, its supporters, 

 thus driven to the wall, may take shelter under the vague 

 and unquestioned truth that the lower plants and animals 

 preceded the higher, and that the order of creation was fish, 

 reptiles, birds, mammalia, quadrumana, and man. From this 

 resource, too, our author has cut off his opponents, and pro- 

 ceeds to show that such an order of creation, " at once won- 

 derful and beautiful," does not afibrd even the slightest pre- 

 sumption in favour of the hypothesis which it is adduced to 

 support. 



This argument is carried on in a popular and amusing dia- 

 logue in the eleventh chapter. Mr Miller shows in the 

 clearest manner, that " superposition is not parental rela- 

 tion," or that an organism lying above another gives us no 

 ground for believing that the lower organism was the parent 

 of the higher. The theorist, however, looks only at those 

 phases of truth which are in unison with his own views; and 

 when truth presents no such favourable aspect, he finally 

 wraps himself up in the folds of ignorance and ambiguity, — 

 the winding-sheet of error refuted and exposed. We have 

 not yet penetrated, says he, in feeble accents, to the forma- 

 tions which represent the dawn of being, and the simplest 

 organism may yet be detected beneath the lowest fossiliferoua 

 rocks. This undoubtedly may he, and Sir Charles Lyell and 



