866 METAMORPHIC ROCKS. CHAP. xxi. 



taining the report was sent to Dick, on which he made 

 the following observations : 



" I fear that he does not hit the assertors of ' the 

 development hypothesis ' so very hard as he imagines. 

 He must know that no geologist says or imagines that 

 all the metamorphic rocks * were so formed at one and 

 the same period of time. Though life may be oblite- 

 rated over wide areas, when the fiery tempest was over 

 in one sea or part of a sea, the organisms would again 

 find their way back to their old abodes. The meta- 

 morphic rocks are of many ages ; and no one can say 

 that, though the mud was changed and became siliceous, 

 the overlying water was unfit to support life. It was 

 the dead they are supposed to have obliterated; the 

 living might have lived on, either in that locality or in 

 some other. 



" Hugh Miller tells us of a ship-captain who sailed 

 for days through a shoal of dead floating haddocks ; but 

 haddocks are still caught and sold. Hugh Miller was 

 a splendid writer, but he was so highly imaginative as 

 to be rather unsafe to rely upon. Besides, one soon gets 

 tired of all geological reasoning. There is nothing on 

 which the mind of the reader can lay hold upon and 

 rest. 'What is truth?' is an old question; but no 

 man in his senses would seek for it in the books of 



" Metamorphic action has arisen from many produc- 



* Metamorphic, literally changed in form ; applied to rocks and rock 

 formations which seem changed from their original condition by some 

 external or interna 1 agency. PAGE'S Handbook of Geology. 



