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THE GEOLOGIST. 



According to Mr. Gosse, the first -created plant was produced witH root, stem, 

 leaves, flowers, fruit, and seed ; and showing in its structure the fallacious evidence 

 of an existence which it never had ; there were the rings of growth in the wood, the 

 scars of the fallen leaves, and all the evidences of seasons of progression, from the 

 seed to the perfect plant, which had never taken place, hut which had only 

 partially passed through the mind of the Creator, in the act of creation ; that the 

 first-made animal, in the structure of its bones and muscles, carried in it also the 

 fallacious marks of birth, and of a general development which it never had ; and 

 that by similar fallacious evidence of ancient conditions of land and sea in the 

 rock-masses of which the earth's crust is composed, and by the entombment in its 

 strata of animal- like forms which never had any existence at all, the world itself 

 is thus, like everything else, made to oiFer a fallacious display of an antiquity it 

 does not possess. As if God could create anything with the impression of untruth 

 upon it. No ; assuredly, if the act of creation was sudden, the created thing or 

 being would at once tell the character of its origin ; if the world was at once 

 created, it would show no evidence of previous stages. A man at once created 

 would bear in his framework no evidence of a birth, an infancy, and youth, which 

 he had not. His muscles, his bones, his flesh, his teeth, even to the very cells of 

 which their structure was composed, would show their newness ; and the first 

 man, if created ^e?/erf, i.e., in the sense of " adult," must have differed from all 

 his progeny. All that Mr. Gosse does in his book to prove one idea tends, 

 without exception, to prove another ; and no greater support of the gradual 

 development doctrine has been written, since the publication of the memorable 

 " Vestiges of Creation " — a purpose, at least, his volume does not profess to serve. 

 We think most persons, not, in the least degree, geologists, would prefer to use 

 their senses rather than blindly to be enslaved by such wild and hypothetical 

 speculations, alike derogatory to the intellect of man, and to the power and 

 wisdom of God. 



A Descriptive Catalogue of the Rock Specimens in the Museum of Practical Geology ; 

 with Explanatory Notices of their Nature and Mode of Occurrence and of the places 

 where they are found. By A. C. Ramsay, F.R.S., Local Director; H. W. Bristow, 

 F.G S., Geologist ; and Hilaky Bauekman, Assistant-Geologist of the Survey 

 of Great Britain. London, 1858. 

 One might think that, in a great country like this, an ofiicial catalogue of a public 

 collection was no great matter, that it was only a reprint, with additions, of an old 

 book of very many editions, and not at all a new thing. But no one who knows 

 the real state of our national collections will wonder at our regarding a mere 

 catalogue as something imperative upon us to notice. The visitor can now walk 

 through the Museum of Economic Geology, catalogue in hand, and learn much 

 without exposing his ignorance — which none of us like to do — of the nature and 

 characters of the rock-specimens there located, and he can deduce from the brief 

 descriptions in the 293 pages before him, something like reasons why those par- 

 ticular fragments of rocks are worthy of appearing in the cases, as well as what 

 are the economic values and properties of the mineral masses or rarieties they 

 represent. In the South Kensington Museum an attempt had already been made 

 to make the objects there teach something to those who go to see them ; and we 

 hail with much pleasure this work of Professor Ramsay in the same path. We 

 trust before long to see the fossils and machinery in this museum similarly noted 

 and explained. 



