REVIEWS — THE TESTIMONY OP THE ROCKS. 205 



cave, " talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite series of causes and 

 effects, which he explained to be a string of blind men, the last of whom caught 

 hold of the skirt of the one before him, he of the next, and so on, till they were all 

 out of sight, and that they all walked infallibly straight, without making one false 

 step, though all were alike blind." With these must I class those assertora of the 

 development hypothesis who can see in the upward progress of bein°; only the 

 operations of an incomprehending and incomprehensible law, through which, in 

 the course of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families have risen into the 

 higher, and inferior into superior natures, and in virtue of which, in short, the 

 animal creation has grown, in at least its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, 

 without thought or care on its own part, and without intelligence on the part of 

 the operating law, from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere 

 promptings of insthut to the highest exercise of reason, — from apes and baboons 

 to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind ; — the unseeing law operates on 

 the unperceiving creatures ; and they go, not together iuto the ditch, but direct 

 onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher and higher at every step. 



" Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead, — 

 the burial place of all that ever lived in the past, — which occupies with its ever- 

 extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and 

 sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. They see the onward pro- 

 cession of being as if but tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all 

 behind, — dead individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations, — a universe 

 of death ; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all the 

 past, shall not our day overtake our own race also, and a time come when men and 

 their works shall have no existence save as stone-pervaded fossils locked up iu ths 

 rock forever ? Nowhere do we find the doubts and fears of this class more admi- 

 rably portrayed than in the works of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive 

 of living poets : — 



" Are God and Nature then at strife, 



That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 



So careful of the type she seems, 

 So careless of the single life ; 

 ' So careful of the type ?' but no, 



From scarped cliff and quarried stone, 



She cries, ' A thousand types are gone.' 

 I care for nothing ; all shall go : 

 Thou makest thine appeal to me : 



I bring to life, I bring to death: 



The spirit does but mean the breath : 

 I know no more.' And he, — shall he, 

 Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, 



Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 



Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, 

 And built him fanes of fruitless prayer, 

 Who trusted God was love indeed, 



And love creation's final law, 



Though Nature, red in tooth and claw, 

 With ravine shrieked against his creed, — 



