ORIGIN OF PLANTS. 213 



^Kthis kind that the earth produces and nourishes, come from 

 ^Kthe sea ? Is it not at least natural to think so, since we are 

 ^^Bpertain that all our habitable lands came originally from the 

 ^H^ea ? Besides, in small islands far from the continent, which 

 ^^■lave appeared but a few ages ago at most, and where it is 

 "^manifest that never any man had been, we find shrubs, herbs, 

 roots, and sometimes animals. Now, you must be forced to 

 own, either that these productions owed their origin to the 

 sea, or to a new creation, which is absurd." 



It is a curious fact, to which, in the passing; I must be 

 permitted to call the attention of the reader, that all the 

 leading assertors of the development hypothesis have been 

 bad geologists. Maillet had for his errors and deficiencies 

 the excellent apology that he wrote more than a hundred 

 years ago, when the theory of a universal ocean, promul- 

 gated by Leibnitz nearly a century earlier, was quite as good 

 as any of the other theories of the time, and when Geology, 

 as a science, had no existence. And so we do not wonder at 

 an ignorance which was simply that of his age, when we find 

 him telling his readers that plants must have originated in 

 the sea, seeing that " all our habitable lands came originally 

 from the sea ;" meaning, of course, by the statement, not at 

 all what the modem geologist would mean were he to employ 

 even the same words, but simply that there was a time when 

 the universal ocean covered the whole globe, and that, as the 

 waters gradually diminished, the loftier mountain summits 

 and higher table-lands, in appearing in their new character 

 as islands and continents, derived their flora from what, in a 

 universal ocean, could be the only possible existing flora, — 

 that of the sea. But what shall we say of the equally pro- 

 found ignorance manifested by Professor Oken, a living autho- 

 rity, whom we find prefacing for the Kay Society, in 1847, 

 the English translation of his " Elements of Physio-Philoso- 



