HUGH MILLER 139 



high. A country may be distinctly a country of flocks 

 and herds, or a country of carnivorous mammalia, or like 

 New South Wales or the Galapagos, a country of mar- 

 supial animals or of reptiles. Its human inhabitants may 

 be merely a few hunters or shepherds, too inconsiderable 

 in numbers to give it any peculiar standing as a home 

 of men. But in estimating the highest point in the 

 scale to which the animal kingdom has attained, it is of 

 the few men, not of its many beasts, that we must take 

 note.' Thus he maintains that the existence of a single 

 cephalopod or one cuttlefish among a wilderness of 

 brachiopods is sufficient to indicate the mark already 

 attained in the scale of being, just as the existence of 

 the human family, when restricted to a pair, indicated 

 as clearly the scale as when its existence can be 

 counted by millions. Under the clearing-system in the 

 Western Highlands, Miller had, during * the cruise of 

 the Betsey,' noticed in the island of Rum a single 

 shepherd and eight thousand sheep. Yet the human 

 unit, to the naturalist, would outweigh all the lower 

 organisms. Moreover, the brachiopods of the palaeozoic 

 age he would regard as larger than those existing now 

 which have sunk by c degradation ' into inferior im- 

 portance. 



The proof of the development theory in the realm of 

 fossil flora he would regard as still more questionable. 

 It had been asserted that in the carboniferous age no 

 exogenous plant had appeared ; that before the Lias 

 nature had not succeeded in producing a tree, and that 



