216 
THE REOLOfJIST. 
According to Mr. Gosse, the first-creatod plant was producc(] 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, but 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 offer 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. Ilis 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 perfect, 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 Dii'ector ; H. W. Bristow, 
F.G S., Geologist ; and Hilaky Bauerman, Assistant-Geologist of the Survey 
of Great Britain. London, 1858. 
One might think that, in a great country like this, an official 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 p.ar- 
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. 
