REVIEWS OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
443 
But for the zeal of the editor, Mr. Richardson, perhaps the work before us would 
never have been published. Wherefore, although he merely claims to have strung 
together the pearls which lay before him, we certainly owe him no small debt of 
gratitude. 
We shall not attempt any abstract, however brief, of these volumes. Indepen¬ 
dently of the impossibility of effecting this in the few pages which can be devoted 
to the review, such abstracts are too apt, from their very nature, to be unfair to 
the author and unsatisfactory to the reader. Our remarks will, therefore, be 
critical, or confined to the notice of strikingly interesting circumstances. 
Our author opens his first lecture by premising, that Fossil Comparative 
Anatomy has, for many years, formed his principal relaxation from an extensive 
medical practice, during which period he formed the collection now celebrated 
among the savans of every civilized land. This collection was thrown open for 
the gratuitous admission of the public. The necessity at length foreseen of closing 
the museum, led to the establishment of the Sussex Royal Institution. For the 
benefit of this Society, the doctor delivered the course of lectures now offered to 
the public. “ And permit me to observe,” says he, “ that my career as a lecturer 
will begin and end in Brighton ; for at the termination of this session, should 
Providence allot me life and health, I shall remove to a less public, but not less 
important sphere of usefulness.” 
That in the whole range of the sciences there is not one more interesting, or 
more wonderful in its disclosures than Geology, we fully agree with Dr. Mantell. 
A study which can, as it were, bring past ages before our ravished view, and give 
importance and meaning to every pebble and grain of sand we meet with, is not to 
be despised. All this is effected by Geology. But it has done much more. 
By proving that Moses did not know quite as much of the earth as Dr. Buckland 
—that he did not exactly teach all that was required respecting our globe—and 
that he was not altogether so accurate as a Mantell, a Sedgwick, or a Lyell, 
and testifying that the Scriptures do not call for that indiscriminate faith and 
reliance once demanded in their behalf, it has contributed not a little to the 
advancement of free inquiiy. A hundred years ago, a man who should openly 
have declared his disbelief in the first chapter of Genesis, and have rendered 
reasons for so doing, would have been deemed mad—if indeed he escaped a more 
severe punishment for his heresy. As science has progressed, the divines, as a 
body, have uniformly opposed its conclusions so far as they were in contradiction 
to the Bible—alarmed, it would seem, lest science might convince them of the 
truth, that the Bible may err as well as any other human work ! The learned, 
however, were desirous of effecting an impossibility—or an absurdity, if pos¬ 
sible—viz. reconciling the unerring results of modern investigation with the 
attempted scientific records of an individual altogether a stranger to scientific 
