RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 237 



associations. According to the old fiction, the look of the 

 basilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen ; 



its mere return glance was harmless : and there is a class 



of thoroughly dangerous writers who in this respect resemble 

 the basilisk. It is perilous to give them a first look of the 

 public. They are formidable simply as the earliest popu- 

 larizers of some interesting science, or the first promulgators 

 of some class of curious little-known facts, with which they 

 mix up their special contributions of error, often the only 

 portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. 

 Nor is it at all so easy to counteract as to confute them. A 

 masterly confutation of the part of their works truly their own 

 may, from its subject, be a very unreadable book : it can have 

 but the insinuated poison to deal with, unmixed with the pa- 

 latable pabulum in which the poison has been conveyed ; and 

 mere treatises on poisons, whether moral or medical, are rarely 

 works of a very delectable order. It seems to be on this 

 principle that there exists no confutation of the " Constitu- 

 tion of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement 

 enough to carry him through ; whereas the work itself, full 

 of curious miscellaneous information, is eminently readable; 

 and that the " Vestiges of Creation," a treatise as entertain- 

 ing as the "Arabian Nights," bids fair, not from the amount 

 of error which it contains, but from the amount of fresh and 

 interestingly-told truth with which the error is mingled, to 

 live and do mischief when the various solidly-scientific re- 

 plies which it has called forth are laid upon the shel Both 

 the "Constitution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, 

 so essential to the basilisk, of taking the first glance of the 

 public on their respective subjects; whereas their confutators 

 have been able to render them back but mere return glances. 

 The only efficiently counteractive mode of looking down the 

 danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted by Mr 

 Longmuir. 



