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operations, Las been most ably and unexpectedly advocated 
as worthy of the most earnest consideration, in Professor 
Kirk’s admirable Discourse, On the Various Geological Theories 
Past and Present , and their Relations to the Teaching of Scrip- 
ture. But I must not now dwell upon this subject. I am 
sure Professor Kirk’s discourse will be felt by all who read it 
to be only second, if not equal in importance, to his own most 
valuable work on the Age of Man , the merits of which have 
been so frankly acknowledged by Sir Charles Lyell. 
In another paper on The Lessons taught us by Geology, by 
the Rev. James Brodie, we had a class of views put forward, 
some of which had been made the ground of sceptical argu- 
ments, but which he showed were quite compatible with the 
most confiding faith in revelation. On the same evening there 
was read another paper, by Dr. Gladstone, F.R.S., On the 
Mutual Helpfulness of Theology .and Natural Science ; in which 
he argued that revelation and science have not in fact been 
truly at issue, but that differences have rather been felt between 
mere human interpretations of the one or the other. The 
gist of these papers and of the discussion upon them was to 
establish fresh pleas for the reinstatement of natural philo- 
sophy as the proper hand-maid of religion — as Lord Bacon 
declared it to be — showing that she may fitly wait with all due 
deference upon “ the Queen of Sciences,” Theology. 
Our next paper was On Falling Stars and Meteorites , by our 
Vice-President, Mr. Mitchell, and it worthily completes No. 4 
and the first volume of our Journal of Transactions. One 
would have imagined that a subject like that might have been 
considered as entirely out of the range of polemical interest. 
But unfortunately it is not so. Our knowledge of falling stars, 
so-called, and of the occasional fall of meteoric stones upon the 
earth, taken in connection with the discovery of the minor 
planets or planetoids, have stimulated scientific conjecture, 
and the imagined meteors which, in 1863, were given out by 
the President of the British Association, as the probable grand 
means for supplying the sun with fuel to prevent it from 
burning itself away, have since been imagined to be thrown 
out from the sun, and afterwards, upon coming into collision in 
space, to conglomerate into planets and to form worlds like our 
own ! You have all heard of the Lucretian notion of material 
things having been formed by the ee fortuitous concourse of 
atoms.” In the 19th century we have improved upon that, 
and imagine worlds to have been formed by the mere fortuitous 
concourse of meteors ! M. Le Merrier, also, some years ago, 
