i2 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 



whose book upon the c Old Red ' has seen its twentieth 

 edition, whose Testimony of the Rocks is in its forty- 

 second thousand, and whose Footprints has seen a 

 seventeenth edition, has only attained this popularity by 

 his solid merits as a writer and thinker. Mere popu- 

 larisation cannot explain it. When a man has fully 

 mastered his subject, and his subject has mastered him, 

 there is sure to emerge a certain demonic force in 

 literature or in science, all the more if the writer be a 

 man with a style. 



It need hardly be said that geology, from its very 

 first appearance, had been associated with distinct 

 views in Biblical criticism. The old chronology of 

 Archbishop Ussher in the margin* of the Authorised 

 Version, by which B.C. 4004 was gravely assigned as the 

 date of the Creation of the world, and B.C. 2348 for the 

 Deluge, was in conflict with a science which required 

 ages for its operations and not the limited confines of 

 six thousand years, which form but a mere geological 

 yesterday to the scientist like Lyell, who postulates 

 some eighty millions of years for the formation of the 

 coal-beds of Nova Scotia. The six 'days' of the 

 Biblical Creation were thought unworthy, as a mere 

 huddling of events into a point of time, of the Divine 

 Wisdom, and impossible in conception. Mistakes in 

 positive statement, no less than of implication, were 

 also alleged against the Mosaic record, which was said 

 to be admirable as literature if not immaculate in 

 science. For long geology was regarded as a hostile 



