456 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



Pre- Adamite earth, while yet a half-extinguished volcano : 

 then, as ages roll on, moving amidst tangled foliage and 

 ravenous creatures, horrid with trenchant tooth and 

 barbed sting, and enveloped in armour of plate and 

 scale, marking all the while and wondering at the pro- 

 gressive work of God, as animal follows plant, and man 

 succeeds animal, and seeking to frustrate it by diabolical 

 wiles, which, however, only fulfil the eternal counsels of 

 Heaven, and issue in the crowning work, the descent 

 and death and ascension of the Incarnate Son of God. 

 Greater as a poet, Robert Burns cannot be placed as a 

 thinker, or a man of science, or a writer of prose, on the 

 level of Hugh Miller. Dugald Stewart expressed his 

 surprise to find Burns form so correct an idea of the then 

 prevailing theory in Edinburgh which referred all 

 beauty to the association of ideas, a theory which 

 seems to have gained the momentary assent of Burns in 

 spite of his own better sense and truer feeling : " That 

 the martial clangour," he says, " of a trumpet had some- 

 thing in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than 

 the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp ; that the delicate 

 flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is 

 heavy with the tears of dawn, was infinitely more 

 beautiful and elegant than the upright stalk of the 

 burdock, and that from something innate and inde- 

 pendent of all association of ideas, these I had set 

 down as irrefragable orthodox truths, until perusing 

 your book shook my faith." No one who had conversed 

 with Hugh Miller would have expressed surprise that 

 he was capable of understanding such truths. He must 

 have been in the clouds himself, who, in talking with 

 him, did not confess that Hugh Miller could soar as 

 high as he; and keep well-balanced pinions all the while. 

 He had no difficulty in understanding the Association 



