258 THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS 



contend that Mailletwaa a geologist. Geology had no place 

 amrng the sciences in the age in which he lived, and even no 

 name. And yet there is a translation of his "Telliamed" now 



But for the demonstration which he asks, as / have conducted it, I beg 

 leave to refer him to the seventeenth chapter of my little work, " First 

 Impressions of England and its People." I am, however, inclined to 

 suspect that he is one of a class whose objections are destined to be re- 

 moved rather by the operation of the laws of matter than of those of 

 mind. For it is a comfortable consideration, that in this controversy the 

 geologists ha/ve the laws of matter on their side; — "the stars in their 

 courses fight against Sisera." Their opponents now, like the opponents 

 of the astronomer in the ages gone by, are, in most instances, men who 

 had been studying the matter "for nearly thirty years." When they 

 study it for a few years longer, they disappear ; and the men of the same 

 cast and calibre who succeed them are exactly the men who throw them- 

 selves most confidently into the anus of the enemy, and look down upon 

 their poor silent predecessors with the loftiest commiseration. It is, 

 however, not uninstructive to remark how thoroughly, in some instances, 

 the weaker friends and the wilier enemies of Revelation are at one ir 

 their conclusions respecting natural phenomena. The correspondent of 

 the "Scottish Press" merely regards the views of the author of the " Ves- 

 tiges" as possessing "the advantage, in point of likelihood," over those 

 of the geologists his antagonists : his ally the Dean of York goes greatly 

 farther, and stands up as stoutly for the transmutation of species as La- 

 marck himself. Descanting, in his * ' New System of Geology, ' ' on the vari- 

 ous forms of trilobites, ammonites, belemnites, &c., Dean Cockbumsays, — 

 " These creatures appear to have possessed the power of secreting from 

 the stone beneath them a limy covering for their backs, and, jerhaps, 

 fed partly on the same solid material. Supposing, now, that the first 

 trilobites were destroyed by the Llandeilo Slates, some spawn of these 

 creatures would arise above these flags, and, after a time, would be 

 warmed into existence. These molluscs, [! !] then, having a better ma- 

 terial from which to extract their food and covering, would probably ex- 

 pand in a slightly dififerent form, and with a more extensive mantle than 

 what belonged to the parent species. The same would be stiU more the 

 case with a new generation, fed upon a new deposit from some deeper 

 volcano, such as the Caradoc or Wenlock Limestone, in which lime more 

 and more predominates. Now, if any one will examine the various prints 

 of trilobites in Sir R. Murchison's valuable work, he wiU find but very 

 trifling difiierences in any of them, [! !] and those difierences only in the 

 stony covering of their backs. I knew two brothers once much alike : 

 the one became a curate, with a large family ; the other a London alder 



