io8 Burnside. 



All partial evil, universal good : 



And spite of pride in erring reason's spite, 



One truth is clear, ' Whatever is, is right.' " 



The rocks, the canon, the bed of the burn, all unite to 

 form a weird picture in the mind. But the bracken has a 

 very strong flavour of these old, old times about it, too. 

 Ferns carry us back in thought to the time when the land 

 first began to emerge from the primaeval waste of waters, and 

 to assume shape and substance ; for it is more than prob- 

 able that the first plant that inhabited the dry land was not 

 unlike the simplest of our ferns. Until then marine algse 

 had held the premier place, and had had no compeers, obtain- 

 ing their food from that waste of water in which they lived 

 and flourished ; but when land plants came into existence, 

 there can be little doubt that they bore some remote 

 resemblance to our ferns of to-day. This is not so specula- 

 tive an idea as it may at first sight appear to be, for down 

 in the depths of the earth the story is written, and the 

 records have been occasionally discovered, and we have 

 learned how imprints of their delicate fronds, or fossilized 

 remnants of their characteristic and well-known steins, have 

 been found buried in these old, old rocks, and have been 

 exposed to the light of day, teaching us that even then they 

 flourished in this world of ours. 



Few, comparatively, the remnants undoubtedly are which 

 are brought to the surface, and only few of these are seen 

 by scientific men, but these few have been more than 

 sufficient to teach us wide-reaching lessons ; and if we con- 

 sider how frail and fragile these delicate plants frequently 

 are, how vast is the superimposed mass which has been 

 deposited on them, and how immense the pressure to which 



