Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh. 3373 



example ; and while we are thus reasoning, man appears upon creation — a creature 

 immeasurahly superior to all the others, and whose very nature it is to make use of 

 his experience of the past for his guidance in the future. And if that only be solid 

 experience or just reasoning which enables man truly to anticipate the events which 

 are to come, and so to make provision for them ; and if that experience be not solid, 

 and that reasoning not just, which would serve but to darken his discernment, and 

 prevent him from correctly predicating the cast and complexion of coming events — 

 what ought to be his decision regarding an argument which, had it been employed in 

 each of the vanished creations of the past, would have had but the effect of arresting 

 all just anticipation regarding the creation immediately succeeding, and which, thus 

 reversing the main end and object of philosophy, would render the philosopher who 

 clung to it less sagacious in divining the future than even the ordinary man ? But, 

 in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those 

 of Hume. The foot-print of his unhappy illustration does not now stand alone. In- 

 stead of one, we see many foot-prints, each in advance of, and on a higher level than, 

 the print immediately behind it ; and founding at once on an acquaintance with the 

 past, extended throughout all the periods of the geologist, and on that instinct of our 

 nature whose peculiar function is to anticipate at least one creation more, we must 

 regard the expectation of 'new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteous- 

 ness,' as not unphilosophic, but as, on the contrary, altogether rational, and fully ac- 

 cording to experience." 



On the motion of Dr. Greville, the thanks of the Society were unanimously voted 

 to Mr. Miller, for his deeply interesting address. 



1. Mr. Miller then laid before the Society calotype figures and a plaster cast of 

 Mr. Patrick Duif's unique specimen, the Stagonolepis of the superior sandstone depo- 

 sit of Moray, hitherto deemed old red. With these he also exhibited the figure of a 

 reptile from the lias of Munich — Mystriosaurus Miinstere — given in a late number of 

 the Munich Transactions, of which he owed the use to the kindness of Sir Charles 

 Lyell. Sir Charles had been struck by the very close resemblance borne by the scales 

 of the liassic reptile to the scales of the supposed palaeozoic fish, i. e., the Stagonolepis 

 — a resemblance certainly very marked ; and he had written to Mr. M., inquiring 

 whether the true place of the deposit in which the latter had been found, with the la- 

 certian reptile recently detected by Mr. Duff, and the reptilian foot-prints recently 

 discovered by Captain Brickenden, had been satisfactorily determined. Might it not, 

 he suggested, be an arenaceous deposit of the lias ? As Dr. Rhind had submitted to 

 the Society, at its last meeting, a drawing of Mr. Duff's lately discovered reptile, Mr. 

 Miller thought he could not do amiss in bringing the subject again before it. He had 

 spent some little time about two years ago, and again in the autumn of last year, in 

 examining the upper beds of the extensively developed sandstones of Moray ; and in 

 the quarry near Brughead, in which, shortly before, the reptilian foot-prints had been 

 discovered, he was informed by the workmen that such prints are by no means very 

 unfrequent among the strata. Of this fact Mr. M. had been assured by Mr. Robert- 

 son, of Woodside, an accomplished geologist, thoroughly acquainted with the various 

 formations of the district, and to whose researches Agassiz owed his Morayshire speci- 

 mens of Bothriolepis ; and until either the one series of rocks — that of the reptiles and 

 the Stagonolepis — yielded known old red sandstone fishes, or until the other — that of 

 the Bothriolepis and Holoptychius — yielded reptilian remains or fragments of Stago- 

 nolepis, Mr. M. thought that the question as to whether the Brughead and Spynie 



