THE GEOLOGIST. 
61 
holy book of Nature, which must ever be read with solemnity and reve- 
rence, they take their places properly in the great sentences and wonderful 
passages of that mysterious language from which Geology interprets 
the order, wisdom, goodness, and prescience displayed in the animated 
worlds that were. It is thus we shall have attained to the true know- 
ledge of the value of fossils, when we shall turn from such readings 
with adoration to the Great Autlior of all. 
CHAPTER II. 
The Rocks — their order and their teachings. 
" Put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the ground on which thou standest 
is holy." And the ground on which we stand is holy. Holy in its 
venerable age, and with the impress of Divinity ; and when with 
solemn reverence we approach the consideration of its eventful history, 
and the skilfulness of its design, are we less in the presence of God 
than was the Lawgiver of old standing, with another purpose, before 
the burning bush ? There is a time for all things — to be gay and to 
be solemn ; and there will be occasions for a lighter style than we 
think fit in this place to pen our thoughts. "We design not to treat of 
the value of the rocks nor of their uses, but to draw from them some of 
those heart-felt lessons which rank amongst the highest efforts and 
best results of the grand science of the earth. 
We begin with the order of the rocks. Is there skill in the con- 
struction and organization of our bodies, is there marvellous mystery 
in the wonderful connection of our corporeal parts with our souls, 
in the combination of the material with the immaterial, of 
bodily existence with spiritual existence, of the animate with the in- 
animate, of senseless matter with the sense -pervaded, sense-pervading, 
ethereal, and immortal spirit ? Is there less of the mysterious and 
wonderful in the minute but living monad — anything less incom- 
prehensible in the living but mind-deficient plant and tree ? Is there 
not skill and perfection, design, and a sustaining hand visible in all 
around us ? And is the great globe orderless and chaotic ? No ! 
The hand that fashioned and created, the great mind that planned and 
endowed with sj)efiaiities the living creature of a daj- or ot' three-score 
