I 



ON GEOLOGIC HISTORY. 277 



world, that we yet see streaked and speckled with simila: 

 memorials, though on an immensely vaster scale, of the erup- 

 tion and overflow which took place during the earthquake ac^es. 

 What could man have done on the globe at a time when such 

 outbursts were comparatively common occurrences 1 What 

 could he have done where Edinburgh now stands, during that 

 overflow of trap porphyry of which the Pentland range forms 

 but a fragment, or that outburst of greenstone of which but 

 a portion remains in the dark ponderous coping of Salisbury 

 Crags, or when the thick floor of rock on which the city stands 

 was broken up, like the ice of an arctic sea during a tempest 

 in spring, and laid on edge from where it leans against the 

 Castle Hill to beyond the quan-ies at Joppa 1 The reasoning 

 brain would have been wholly at fault in a scene of things 

 in which it could neither foresee the exterminating calamity 

 while yet distant, nor control it when it had come ; and so 

 the reasoning brain was not produced until the scene had 

 undergone a slow but thorough process of change, during 

 which, at each progressive stage, it had furnished a platform 

 for higher and still higher life. When the coniferss could 

 flourish on the land, and fishes subsist in the seas, fishes and 

 cone-bearing plants were created ; when the earth became a 

 fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were pro- 

 duced ; with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of 

 things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in ; and, last of 

 all, when man's house was fully prepared for him, — when the 

 data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had 

 become fixed and certain, — the reasoning, calculating brain 

 was moulded by the creative finger, and man became a living 

 soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous 

 inscription chiselled deep in the rocks. It furnishes us with 

 no clue by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of 

 creation ; — ^these mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, 

 and to Him only. We attempt to theorize upon them, and 



