NO DOGMATIC THEORIST. 331 



which presented themselves to his notice, did not pro- 

 pound a cut-and-dry rival theory, or profess to have 

 formed a scheme of his own upon which to map out and 

 explain every mystery of organized being. With no fixed 

 principle except that the Earth is the Lord's and the ful- 

 ness thereof, that the laws of life and of death, of matter 

 and of mind, are His laws, and that, on the whole, the 

 procession of existence, moving at times through breadths 

 of gloom and masses of shadow, tends onwards and up- 

 wards, he recognized all facts, admitted all difficulties, 

 and preferred to state them honestly and contemplate 

 them deliberately rather than bind them together with 

 logical formulas. The fact of the degradation of 

 races, for example, of the startling delight which 

 nature appears occasionally to take in eccentric and 

 asymmetrical types, of the production of what, to 

 human apprehension and sensibility, look mere master- 

 pieces of the horrible and repulsive, ' worm-like creatures, 

 without eyes, without moveable jaws, without vertebral 

 joints, without scales, always enveloped in slime/ like 

 the ' glutinous hag ' of the Moray Frith, had evi- 

 dently awakened the deepest feelings of wonder in 

 Hugh Miller. ' An ingenious theorist/ he said, ' not 

 much disposed to distinguish between the minor and 

 the master laws of organized being/ could get up 

 ' quite as unexceptionable a theory of degradation as 

 of development/ But the relation of the ' minor laws/ 

 to which presumably we owe the glutinous hag, and the 

 ' master laws/ to which we owe the gazelle and the night- 

 ingale, the rose and the wheat-plant, he did not at- 

 tempt to define, contenting himself with the denial 

 that either are mere processes of physical nature, and 

 with the assertion that both are parts of His govern- 

 ment who is wonderful in working, and whose ways 



