2 1 4 LAMARCKIAN HYPOTHESIS OF THE 



pby ]" " The first creation of the organic took place, we 

 find him saying, " where the first mountain summits projected 

 out of the sea, — indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Hima- 

 laya be the highest mountain.'' Here, evidently, in this late 

 age of the world, in which Geology does exist as a science, do 

 we find the ghost of the universal ocean of Leibnitz walking 

 once more, as if it had never been laid. Is there now in all 

 Britain even a tyro geologist so unacquainted with geological 

 fact as not to know that the richest flora which the globe 

 ever saw had existed for myriads of ages, and then, becoming 

 extinct, had slept in the fossil state for myriads of ages more, 

 ere the highest summits of the Himalayan range rose over 

 the surface of the deep ^ The Himalayas disturbed, and bore 

 up along with them in their upheaval, vast beds of the Ooli- 

 tic system. Belemnites and ammonites have been dug out 

 of their sides along the line of perpetual snow, seventeen 

 thousand feet over the level of the sea. What in the recent 

 period form the loftiest mountains of the globe, existed as 

 portions of a deep-sea bottom, swum over by the fishes and 

 reptiles of the great Secondary period, when what is now 

 Scotland had its dark forests of stately pine, — represented in 

 the present age of the world by the lignites of Helmsdale, 

 Eathie, and Eigg, — and when the plants of a former creation 

 lay dead and buried deep beneath, in shales and fire-clay, — 

 existing as vast beds of coal, or entombed in solid rock, as 

 the brown massy trunks of Granton and Craigleith. And even 

 ere these last existed as living trees, the coniferous lignite of 

 the Lower (Middle) Old Ked Sandstone found at Cromarty had 

 passed into the fossil state, and lay as a semi-calcareous, semi- 

 bituminous mass, amid peiished Dipterians and extinct Coc^ 

 costei. So much for the geology of the German Professoi. 

 And be it remarked, that the actualities in this question can 

 be determined by only the geologist. The mere naturalist 

 may indicate from the analogies of his science, what possibly 



