194 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCKLAND. 
[CH. VIII. 
what it is to have drawings, many of them from microscopic 
objects, made by artists, of new and unfamiliar subjects— 
let him consider that five or six different artists have 
been employed—that all their errors had severally to be 
corrected, that these engravings consist of seven hundred 
and five figures—then I repeat that he alone who has had 
a full experience of the difficulty will be able to appreciate 
the causes of the delay. For my own part I am astonished 
it has been finished so soon ; and of this I assure you, that 
such is the intricacy of the subject, such the tiresomeness 
of the details, that were the work to be done over again, 
no power on earth should induce me to undertake it.’' 
In the second chapter of the Bridgewater Treatise Dr. 
Buckland uses an argument, which is now familiar, but was 
then comparatively ignored. He urged that the Bible was 
not written to Teach scientific truth, but to reveal God and 
to instruct us in the Divine Life. Nay more ; he does 
not hesitate to say that, if the Bible had been made an 
adequate text-book of science, men would have found it a 
source of perplexity and not of enlightenment. 
“We may fairly ask of those persons who consider 
physical science a fit subject for revelation, what point they 
can imagine short of a communication of Omniscience at 
which such a revelation might have stopped, without im¬ 
perfections of omission, less in degree, but similar in kind, 
to that which they impute to the existing narrative of 
Moses? A revelation of so much only of astronomy as 
was known to Copernicus, would have seemed imperfect 
after the discoveries of Newton, and a revelation of the 
science of Newton would have appeared defective to La 
Place ; a revelation of all the chemical knowledge of the 
eighteenth century would have been as deficient in com¬ 
parison with the information of the present day, as what is 
now known in this science will probably appear before the 
termination of another age. In the whole circle of sciences 
