58 BRITISH ASSOCIATION EOK THE ADVANCEMENT OE SCIENCE. 



It is, indeed, not less calculated to subserve to the gratification of our sense of the 

 Beautiful than to provide against too wide a departure from that order of creation 

 which its great Author has from the beginning instituted ; and, as two learned ' 

 Professors of a sister kingdom have pointed out in Memoirs laid before this Associa- 

 tion, and have since embodied in a distinct treatise, manifests itself not less in the 

 geometrical adjustment of the branches of a plant, and of the scales of a fir-apple 

 — nay even, as they have wished to prove, in the correspondence between the form 

 of the fruit and that of the tree on which it grows — than in the frequent juxtaposi- 

 tion of the complimentary rays of the spectrum, by which that harmony of colour 

 is produced ia Nature which we are always striving, however unsuccessfully, to 

 Imitate in Art. The law, indeed, seems to be nothing else than a direct consequence 

 of that unity of design pervading the universe, which so bespeaks a common Crea- 

 tor — of the existence in the mind of the Deity of a sort of archetype, to which His 

 various works have all, to a certain extent, been accommodated ; so that the earlier 

 forms of life may be regarded as types of those of latter creation, and the more 

 complex ones but as developments of rudimentary parts existing in the more sim- 

 ple. 



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 I might be disposed to claim for the recent investigations of botanists some share 

 in fixing the relative antiquity of particular portions of the globe, for from the 

 Floras they have given us of different islands in the Great Pacific, it would appear 

 that the families of plants which characterize some groups are of a more compli- 

 cated organization than those of another. Thus, whilst Otaheite chiefly contains 

 Orchids, Apocynese, Asclepiadese, and TJrticeae ; the Sandwich Islands possess Lo- 

 beliaceaj and Goodenovise ; and the Galapagos Islands, New Zealand and Juan 

 Fernandez, Compositae, the highest form, perhaps, of dicotyledonous plants. In 

 deducing this consequence, however, I am proceeding upon a principle which has 

 lately met with opposition, although it was formerly regarded as one of the axioms 

 in Geology. Amongst these, indeed, there was none which a few years ago seemed 

 so little likely to be disputed as that the classes of animals and vegetables which 

 possessed the most complicated structure were preceded by others of a more sim- 

 ple one ; and that when we traced back the succession of beings to the lowest and 

 the earliest of the sedimentary formations, we arrived at length at a class of rocks, 

 the deposition of which must be inferred, from the almost entire absence of organic 

 remains, to have followed very soon after the first dawn of creation. But the re- 

 cognition of the footsteps and remains of reptiles in beds of an earlier date than 

 was before assigned to them, tended to corroborate the inferences which had been 

 previously deduced from the discovery, in a few rare instances, in rocks of the se- 

 condary age, of mammalian remains; and thus has induced certain eminent geolo- 

 gists boldly to dispute, whether from the earliest to the latest period of the earth's 

 history any gradation of beings can in reality be detected. Into this controversy 

 I shall only enter at present, so far as to point out an easy method of determining 

 the fact, that organic remains never can have existed in a particular rock, even al- 

 though it may have been subjected to such metamorphic action as would have 

 obliterated all traces of their presence. This is simply to ascertain that the mate- 

 rial in question is utterly destitute of phosphoric acid; for inasmuch as every form 

 of life appears to be essentially associated witli this principle, and as no amount of 

 heat would be sufficient to dissipate it when in a state of combination, whatever 

 quantity of phosphoric acid had in this manner been introduced into the rock, must 



