198 EVIDENCE OF THE FOSSIL FLORA. 



darkly fringed by an obscure bank of cloud ranged along the 

 last zone in the series, a night that never dissipates settles 

 down upon the deep. Our voyage, like that of the old fabu- 

 lous navigators of five centuries ago, terminates on the sea in 

 a thick darkness, beyond which there lies no shore and there 

 dawns no light. And it is in the middle of this vast ocean, 

 just where the last zone of the Old Red leans against the 

 first zone of the Silurian, that we have succeeded in discover- 

 ing a solitary island unseen before, — a shrub-bearing land, 

 much enveloped in fog, but with hills that at least look green 

 in the distance. There are patches of floating sea- weed much 

 comminuted by the surf all around it ; and on one project- 

 ing headland we see clear through our glasses a cone-bearing 

 tree. 



This certainly is not the sort of arrangement demanded by 

 the exigencies of the development hypothesis. Who that has 

 watched the progress of discovery for the last twenty years, and 

 seen the place of the earliest ichthyolite transferred from the 

 Carboniferous to the Cambrian (Silurian) system, ami that of 

 the earliest exogenous lignite from the Lias to the Devonian, 

 will now venture to say that fossil wood may not yet be detected 

 as low in the scale as any vegetable organism whatever, or 

 fossil fish as low as the remains of any animal 1 But though 

 the response of the earlier geologic systems be thus unfavour- 

 able to the development hypothesis, may not men such as the 

 author of the "Vestiges" urge, that the geologic evidence, 

 taken as a whole, and in its bearing on groupes and periods, 

 establishes the general fact that the lower plants and animals 

 preceded the higher, — that the conifera, for instance, pre- 

 ceded our true forest trees, such as the oak and elm, — that, 

 in like manner, the fish preceded the reptile, that the reptile 

 preceded the bird, that the bird preceded the mammiferous 

 quadruped and the quadrumana, and that the mammiferous 

 quadruped and the quadrumana preceded man ? Assuredly 



