MARINE AND TERRESTRIAL. 235 



to grow. And there, short and thick, and of a bleached yel- 

 low Ime, it ceases also ; but one of the commoner marine con- 

 fervae, — the Conferva arcta, blent with a dwarfed Entero- 

 morpha^ — commencing a very little below where the dulse 

 ends, and taking its place, clothes over the runnels with its 

 covering of green for several feet higher, — in some cases, 

 where it is frequently washed by the upward dash of the 

 waves, it rises above even the flood-line ; and in some 

 crevice of the rock beside it, often as low as its upper edge, 

 we may detect stunted tufts of the sea-pink or of the scurvy- 

 grass. But while there is thus a vegetation intermediate in 

 place between the land and the sea, we find, as if it had been 

 selected purposely to confound the transmutation theory, that 

 it is in no degree intermediate in character. For, while it 

 is chiefly marine weeds of the lower division of the confervse 

 that creep upwards from the sea to meet the vegetation of the 

 land, it is chiefly terrestrial plants of the higher division of 

 the dicotyledons that creep downwards from the land to meet 

 the vegetation of the sea. The salt-worts, the glass-worts, 

 the arenaria, the thrift, and the scurvy-grass, are all dicotyle- 

 donous plants. Nature draws a deeply-marked line of divi- 

 sion where the requirements of the transmutative hypothesis 

 would demand the nicely graduated softness of a shaded one ; 

 and, addressing the strongly-marked floras on either hand, 

 even more sternly than the waves themselves, demands that 

 to a certain definite bourne should they come, and no farther. 

 But in what form, it may be asked, or with what limita- 

 tions, ought the Christian controversialist to avail himself, in 

 this question, of the experience argument 1 Much ought to 

 depend, I reply, on the position taken up by the opposite side. 

 We find no direct reference made by the author of the " Ves- 

 tiges" to the anti-miracle argument, first broached by Hume, 

 in a purely metaphysical shape, in his well-known " Inquiry," 

 and afterwards thrown into the algebraic form by La Place, 



