THE INDEPENDENCE OF SCIENCE. 335 



People, have been of none effect. It is too probable 

 that if he had lived twenty years longer, he would have 

 found himself looked on askance by some Evangelical 

 magnates of his own country. He had never hesitated to 

 abandon an old position when he found it to be unten- 

 able, and he had not been long in his grave when there 

 were unmistakeable signs that part of clerical Scotland 

 was disposed to fall back upon at least one of the lines of 

 defence which he had given up, to wit, the hypothesis of 

 a cataclysm or chaos, embracing the whole world, 

 immediately antecedent to the human period, and 

 separating the entire succession of geological formations 

 from the six days' work of Genesis. Instead of this 

 view he adopted that which assigns an immensely pro- 

 tracted duration to the successive Mosaic days. In his 

 latest work, the Testimony of the Rocks, he expounded 

 the Age theory of Mosaic geology with admirable 

 breadth and lucidity ; and it is generally admitted that 

 this is the sole hypothesis which can now be maintained 

 with any show of plausibility by those who hold Chris- 

 tian theologians bound to furnish a scheme of reconcili- 

 ation between geology and Genesis. 



Hugh Miller maintained the entire independence of 

 science. ' No scientific question,' he says, ' was ever 

 yet settled dogmatically, or ever will. If the question 

 be one in the science of numbers, it must be settled 

 arithmetically ; if in the science of geometry, it must be 

 settled mathematically ; if in the science of chemistry, 

 it must be settled experimentally. ... As men have 

 yielded to astronomy the right of decision in all astro- 

 nomical questions, so must they resign to geology the 

 settlement of all geological ones.' Again : ' The geolo-. 

 gist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclu- 

 sively his own ; and were the theologian ever to remem- 



