120 Notices of Books . [January, 
disintegration, denudation, and destruction. The sea is the 
region of perpetual deposit and conservation. And sea-strata 
when hoisted up by heat in the form of slate, sandstone, lime- 
stone, &c., form museums of sea-life of an antiquity quite 
incomprehensible to man. But these museums contain sea-life 
only: land-animals neither live nor die in the sea ; they live and 
die on the land. And where are the museums for the preserva- 
tion of ancient land-life ? There cannot be such a thing. The 
entire surface of the earth is perpetually vanishing, and with it 
the museums for the preservation of ancient land-life. The 
most ancient museums of land-life are caverns, filled-up lakes, 
bogs, and drift and alluvium — things which, geologically speaking, 
were formed yesterday and will be gone to-morrow. In these 
modern land-museums, however, the remains of man and extincl 
mammalia are found, and they would be found in more ancient 
land-museums if such ancient land-museums could exist 
The whole affair is the result of the most childish confusion 
between space and time, between place and period. That is, 
because in the deposit of a certain place such a life only existed, 
we set it down that in the period when that deposit was formed 
that life only existed. Hence such errors as ‘ The age of rep- 
tiles,’ ‘ The diluvial period,’ ‘ The boulder period,’ ‘ The drift 
period,’ ‘ The period of invertebrates,’ ‘ The pluvial period,’ 
‘ The gravel period,’ ‘ The peat period,’ &c.” At the same time, 
however, the author admits that species have died out and that 
others have been successively created, “ and at distindt times, 
and in comparatively modern times.” Further we read — “Unless 
we except man (as I think we may) the existence of all organic 
species is not only finite, but it is transitory as compared with 
the existence of the globe, and it depends on second causes.” 
Therefore the whole dodtrine of the successive appearance and 
disappearance of species, which we have just seen denied, is 
after all admitted ! This appearance and existence, too, is in one 
place spoken of as due to “ second causes,” and yet in another 
it is referred to a succession of creations ! 
All the knots of animal and vegetal geography are abruptly 
and compendiously cut. “ Like the chicken-fancier who keeps 
his fowl-yards separate, Nature seems purposely to have con- 
trived different stations with similar physical conditions, in order 
to exhibit the profuseness of her creative power in cramming all 
full of animal and vegetal existences with constitutions similar 
to those of similar but separate stations, but the species of each 
similar separate station differing entirely from the species of all 
other separate stations.” We need scarcely point out how radi- 
cally unscientific, or rather anti-scientific, is the spirit of this 
passage. If this method of accounting for the phenomena 
which meet us in the universe is to be accepted, why should we 
observe, register, classify, or seek to account for anything ? 
Why not close our books, give our apparatus to the children for 
