82 The Testimony of the Rocks. 



admit that his brain, irritated by over work, bad become a prey 

 to undue excitement and groundless fears, — we shall suspend our 

 judgment on the question of accidental death or suicide, until we 

 meet our friend again in that world where he now enjoys an eman- 

 cipation from his earthly toils and frailties. 



The subject of this work was one on which its author thought 

 deeply and often ; and few men were better fitted for it by the 

 rare combination of acute powers of observation applied to na- 

 ture, and firm faith in revealed religion. The question of the rela- 

 tions of the Bible to science, and especially to the science of the 

 earth, is not one which either naturalists or theologians can afford 

 to neglect. Those who have no settled faith in the inspiration of 

 the written word may smile at any attempt io compare it with the 

 deductions of science. Those who do not appreciate the mass of 

 evidence accumvrlated by modern geology, may sneer at what ap- 

 pears to them an upstart and unsettled jumble of hypotheses. 

 Nevertheless, it is morally certain that the Bible must maintain a 

 .constantly increasing ascendancy over the minds of men, and 

 that they must accept it as a revelation of God, as the Creator 

 as well as the Redeemer. On the other hand the leading princi- 

 ples of geology rest on a basis of facts, firm as the everlasting 

 hills, and their popular acceptance is daily widening. The Testi- 

 mony of the Rocks, in its bearing on the natural and revealed 

 theologies, must therefore form a department of inquiry running 

 parallel with the acceptance among civilized men of that testimo- 

 ny and of those theologies. 



The Testimony of the Rocks is not a systematic treatise, but 

 a collection of lectures, yet the writer's strong love of order has 

 thrown the matter into an arrangement which brings out very 

 forcibly and lucidly his two leading views. First, that there hfis 

 been throughout the long periods of geological history, a constant 

 and regular onward march of new forms of existence, cori'espond- 

 ino- with the received views of the relative rank of organization 

 of animals and plants, yet not proceeding from spontaneous deve- 

 lopment, but from creation. Secondly, that the introduction of 

 new forms of animals and plants corresponded with the days or 

 rather long " eons" represented by the Mosaic vision of creation. 

 The first lecture accordingly contains a connected sketch of the 

 history of plants, from the old fucoids of the Silurian seas, and 

 the huge cryptogams and antique conifers of the Devonian and 

 Carboniferous erus, to the more varied vegetation of the modem 



