SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 137 



livened by fleets of nautili spreading their tiny sails to 

 the wind, and presenting their colours of pearl and azure 

 to the sun.' 



Nor is it only of his capacity as an observer and 

 skill as an imaginative describer that this remarkable 

 chapter gives us an earnest. It reveals with impressive 

 distinctness the spirit in which he would cultivate 

 science. Not as a mere collector of facts, or word- 

 painter of geological landscape, would he work, but in 

 full view and constant recollection of every momentous 

 question relating to the nature and destiny of man on 

 which science might touch. Religion had become the 

 central and regulating force in his character ; religion 

 he believed to have been the source of all that was best 

 and most enduring in the character of his country ; re- 

 ligion, turning the regards of man to a Divine Father, 

 and opening the human eye on a pathway of eternal 

 advance, appeared to him inseparably involved with the 

 majesty and well-being of man as a species. Inspired 

 with a passionate devotion both to science and to religion, 

 he could not but seek to put the hand of the one into 

 the hand of the other, and to mediate between the two. 

 The following passage might serve as a preface to that 

 whole series of works in which he subsequently made it 

 his effort to interpret the language of the rocks in a manner 

 which would not contradict the statements of Holy 

 Writ. ' Let us quit/ he says, as he turns from those 

 scenes of primeval creation on which he has been expati- 

 ating, ' this wonderful city of the dead, with all its re- 

 clining obelisks, and all its sculptured tumuli, the me- 

 morials of a race that exist only in their tombs. And 

 yet, ere we go, it were well, perhaps, to indulge in some 

 of those serious thoughts which we so naturally associate 

 with the solitary burying-ground, and the mutilated re- 



