IN SCIENCE
'In league with the stones of the field.'--JOB v. 23.
The geologist writes in sand literally and historically, and in the
science of the Testimony of the Rocks super-session is the law. 'Such,'
says Miller himself in the preface to the first edition of the
_Old Red Sandstone_, 'is the state of progression in geological science
that the geologist who stands still but for a very little must be
content to find himself left behind.' The advancing tide of knowledge
leaves the names of the early pioneers little more than a list of
extinct volcanoes. Hooke and Burnet, Ray and Woodward, Moro and Michel,
are to the ordinary mass of readers about as obsolete as the saurian
and the mastodon. Only the very few can live in a tide so strong, which
bears away not only the older landmarks but even such names as Werner
and Hutton, Hall and Fleming.
From about 1830 to 1850 the old metaphysical reign seems to have
ceased; and Jeffrey, in the palmy days of the _Edinburgh Review_,
could declare that the interest in psychology had well-nigh passed
away with Dugald Stewart. Natural Science seemed to be taking its
place, and the British Association movement lent impetus to the new
_régime_. Sedgwick, Buckland, Murchison, Owen, and others, followed by
Huxley and Tyndall, appeared to herald the advent of an age when the
most difficult problems could be read off the book of Nature, and the
public turned eagerly from the Babel of the philosophers to the men of
the new school in a sort of expectation of a royal road to learning,
without missing their way in theological jungle or 'skirting the
howling wastes' of metaphysics. Needless to say, the hopes were no
more realised than were the expectations of a golden age of material
prosperity in the wake of the Reform Bill. The problem of man and his
destiny remains as rooted as ever, and the metaphysician has not been
dislodged. The old battle of the evidences had been fought in the
domain of mental science, and when transferred to the natural sciences
the fight was not productive of the expected results. The times, as
Richter said, were indeed 'a criticising critical time, hovering
between the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of conflicting
times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolve
round that centre: there _is_ no pure entire confusion, but all such
presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.' In Scotland and in
England the great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the
Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary of theology, and
the school of natural science was in possession of the field. Now the
tide has turned, and the geologist is threatened with eclipse. Of
the _doyen_ of the new school, Richard Owen, Professor Huxley
says:--'Hardly any of those speculations and determinations have stood
the test of investigation. I am not sure that any one but the
historian of anatomical science is ever likely to recur to them.
Obvious as are the merits of Owen's anatomical and palæontological
work to every expert, it is necessary to be an expert to discuss them;
and countless pages of analysis of his memoirs would not have made the
general reader any wiser than he was at first.' Even Buckland is
regarded by Boyd Dawkins as belonging to a type of extinct men. Thus
is the deposition effected of the scientific Pope of the day. If such
rapid supersession be the law, who can expect in departing to leave
footprints in the annals of so shifting a science? Who can be a fixed
star?
There is some comfort in the reflection that, as in Political Economy,
so in Geology, it is the inspiration that lives and not the mere amount
of positive contribution to knowledge. Bacon has effected nothing for
science; in everything that he attempted it may be shown that he was
wrong and that his methods have led to nothing. His name is associated
with no new discovery, no new law, not even with a new or inductive
method. But his niche is secure through the spirit in which he
approached the question; if he did not see the Promised Land, at
least he was a firm believer in its existence, and that spirit has
outlived his unhappy detraction of greater men than himself in mental
philosophy. His mind was swift to perceive analogies, and such a type
of mind, if it adds little to actual knowledge, is at least valuable
as a stimulus. Carlyle in his political pamphlets has certainly not
advanced the lines of the 'dismal science'; he even contemptuously
doubted its existence, and he has done harm to it through the
ready-reckoner school of _à priori_ economists who refer everything
with confidence to their own internal consciousness. Yet Carlyle at his
worst has his value. He has the merit of showing that the problem is in
its very nature an everlasting one, and that the plummet line of the
mere profit-and-loss moralist will never sound the depths of man and
his destiny. Such thinkers are, however, rare; but in natural science
they are the salt. Such are Oken, Cuvier, Darwin; their position is
independent of the truth of their theories, and they have the gift of a
fused and informing imagination, by which their theories are landmarks.
Much of their work has already been recast, and some of their once
supposed safest generalisations have been abandoned. But the progress
of science revolves round them as central suns. Hardly one of Niebuhr's
interpretations of Roman history has stood the test of subsequent
investigations, any more than those of Ewald in the field of Biblical
criticism. Yet in historical science no two men have a more assured
rank.
It is this informing power that keeps alive the geologist. Hume owes
his position in metaphysics to this power, and to his great gifts as a
stylist. Few men of science have had graces of style. In Darwin it is
lacking, and he has himself set on record that literature and art had
ceased for him to exert any influence, and that a mere novel had become
the highest form of intellectual amusement. Hutton needed a Playfair to
make him intelligible, as Dugald Stewart was needed for the exposition
of Reid. But it is this power that will keep Miller alive. His views
upon the Old Red Sandstone, on the Noachian Deluge, on the Mosaic
Cosmogony, may be right or wrong. But they have the sure merit of
abiding literature, and men highly endowed with this gift have a
lasting and assured fame. Mr. Lowell has declared Clough to be the true
poet of the restlessness of the later half of the century, and Tennyson
to be but its pale reflex. But the answer is ready and invincible:
Tennyson is read, and Clough is already on the shelf. As a piece of
imaginative writing, _The Old Red Sandstone_ is not likely to be soon
surpassed in its own line. 'I would give,' we find Buckland declaring,
'my left hand to possess such powers of description as this man has.'
'There is,' says Carlyle, 'right genial fire, everywhere nobly tempered
down with peaceful radical heat, which is very beautiful to see.
Luminous, memorable; all wholesome, strong, fresh, and breezy, like the
"Old Red Sandstone" mountains in a sunny summer day.' We doubt if a
single page of Sedgwick, or of Buckland even in his _Bridgewater
Treatise_, be read--at least as literature. But a man, whose book upon
the 'Old Red' has seen its twentieth edition, whose _Testimony of the
Rocks_ is in its forty-second thousand, and whose _Footprints_ has seen
a seventeenth edition, has only attained this popularity by his solid
merits as a writer and thinker. Mere popularisation cannot explain it.
When a man has fully mastered his subject, and his subject has mastered
him, there is sure to emerge a certain demonic force in literature or
in science, all the more if the writer be a man with a style.
It need hardly be said that geology, from its very first appearance,
had been associated with distinct views in Biblical criticism. The old
chronology of Archbishop Ussher in the margin of the Authorised
Version, by which B.C. 4004 was gravely assigned as the date of the
Creation of the world, and B.C. 2348 for the Deluge, was in conflict
with a science which required ages for its operations and not the
limited confines of six thousand years, which form but a mere
geological yesterday to the scientist like Lyell, who postulates some
eighty millions of years for the formation of the coal-beds of Nova
Scotia. The six 'days' of the Biblical Creation were thought unworthy,
as a mere huddling of events into a point of time, of the Divine
Wisdom, and impossible in conception. Mistakes in positive statement,
no less than of implication, were also alleged against the Mosaic
record, which was said to be admirable as literature if not immaculate
in science. For long geology was regarded as a hostile intruder, and it
required much time to assuage the fears on the one hand and lessen the
rather vague pretensions on the other, before the lines of demarcation
could be firmly drawn, if indeed, in a certain class of both
theological and scientific minds, they can be said to be even yet
settled. There is still the Voltairian type of thinker which is not yet
exploded; and which, even in the case of Professor Huxley, has imagined
that a mere shaking of the letter of a text or two is tantamount to an
annihilation of the Christian faith. 'That the sacred books,' as
Carlyle says, 'could be all else than a Bank of Faith Bill, for such
and such quantities of enjoyment, payable at sight in the other world,
value received; which Bill becomes a waste paper, the stamp being
questioned; that the Christian Religion could have any deeper
foundations than books, nothing of this seems to have even in the
faintest matter occurred to Voltaire. Yet herein, as we believe the
whole world has now begun to discover, lies the real essence of the
question.' Science, in fact, after a long _régime_ of even more than
Macaulayesque cocksureness, is now abating its tone. It now no longer
threatens like a second flood to cover the earth, and it is possible
for mental and historical science to reappear like the earth out of the
waters, and a clear line to be drawn between the limits of mind and
matter. Happily, accordingly, it is no longer possible for a Voltaire
to meet the theologian with a belief that the shells found on high
hills were dropped by pilgrims and palmers from the Holy Land, any
more than it would be possible to assert, with Dugald Stewart, that
the words in Sanskrit akin to Greek were dropped by the troops of
Alexander the Great. It is now as impossible to maintain, with the
mythologists of legend, that the Ross-shire hills were formed by the
_Cailliach-more_, or great woman, who dropped stones through the
bottom of the panniers on her back, as it would be for any reactionary
Chauteaubriand to assert that God made the world, at the beginning,
precisely as we see it with all its completeness and antiquity, since
he believed an infancy of the world would be a world without
romance!--denying creation in periods, and asserting it in
instantaneous processes, by which the fossils were even created just
as we see them. Such a conception is not to exalt the Divine Power;
or, if it appears to do so, it yet effectively annihilates a belief in
the Divine Wisdom that could create pretty toys and useless fossils--a
creation of mummies and skeletons that were never from the very
beginning intended to be anything but skeletons, without any relation
to living beings.
Miller accordingly makes it perfectly plain in what spirit he
approaches the sacred record. The Bible, he says repeatedly, is neither
a scientific text-book nor even a primer. Why, he asks, should it be
regarded as necessary to promulgate the truths of geology when those of
astronomy have been withheld? 'Man has everywhere believed in a book
which should be inspired and should teach him what God is and what God
demands of him, and this expectation is fully met in the Bible. But
nowhere has man looked for the divine revelation of scientific truth,
for it is in accordance with the economy of Providence, that Providence
which is exhibited in gradual developments, that no such expectation
has been or need be realised, the _Principia_ of Newton and the
discoveries of James Watt being both the result of the natural and
unaided faculties of man.' Nay, more; there never could have been such
a revelation given, for never yet has a single scientific truth been
revealed. But, on the other hand, when he contrasts this clear
perception of the demarcation of religion and science in the Bible, and
the all too copious neglect of it in the other sacred books of the
world, he is constrained to regard this very ability of distinction
between two classes of truth as a strong argument for its inspiration.
On Man and his destiny he is no less clear, and he has many fertile
suggestions to offer. His main thesis in this connection we have
already seen as determining in his own life its central point. Man he
regards as literally the fellow-worker with God. Up till his appearance
upon the earth, nature had been remarkable only for what it was, but
not for what it became. The advent of man marks the improver of
creation--God made manifest in the flesh. Between his intellect and
that of his Creator there is a relation, since we find creature and
Creator working by the same methods. Precisely as we see China arriving
at the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass
without any connection with the West, so we see the works of the
Creator in the palæozoic period repeated by the tiny creature-worker,
without any idea that he had been anticipated. Thus Creation is not
merely a scheme adapted to the nature of man, but one specially adapted
to the pattern nature of God. Man made in the image of God is a real
and fitting preparation for God's subsequent assumption of the form of
man. 'Stock and graft had the necessary affinity,' and were finally
united in the one person. History is, therefore, no mere finite record
dating from a human act in Eden, but is the real result of a decree,
'in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme.'
The problem of the origin of evil is of course a difficulty viewed in
relation to the decrees of God, in whom no evil can exist. In the
present state of things he regards evil as due to man himself. The
deputed head of creation has voluntarily and of his own free will
_not_ chosen to be a fellow-worker with God, who, while binding
him fast in the chain of events, has yet left his will free. To ordain
sin would be a self-contradiction of the idea of God; He but creates
the being that in turn creates sin. 'Fore-knowledge,' as Milton says,
'had no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain
unforeseen.' Perhaps this is as near as we are ever likely to get. But
the Fall in its theological aspect, while it must be fully apprehended
by faith, has nothing to fear from science, which teaches, if it can be
said emphatically to teach one thing, that the sins of the fathers are
visited upon the children. With Coleridge, therefore, he regards the
Fall as a necessary stage in the history of thought and of man. The
creation of the non-absolute gives a pivot without which all subsequent
events would be inexplicable. It gives the true means of colligating
the phenomena: Man, if at the Fall he lost Eden, gained a conscience
and a moral sense.
More remarkable is his attempted reconciliation of science and the
Mosaic cosmogony. Chalmers had regarded the Biblical account as
relating only to existing creations, and believed in the existence of a
chaotic period of death and darkness between this present world and the
prior geological ages. Pye Smith, on the other hand, had regarded chaos
as both temporary and limited in extent, and believed that outside this
area there had existed lands and seas basking in light and occupied by
animals. But subsequent geological knowledge had shown that this theory
of cataclysms and breaks was without evidence--many of the present
plants and animals co-existing with those of the former periods; nor
could Smith's theory of light existing round the coasts of the earth be
brought to square with the distinct statement of the primal creation of
light in Genesis. On the other hand, Miller notices that geology, as
dealing not with the nature of things, but only with their actual
manifestations, has to do with but three of the six days or periods.
The scale of all geologists is divided into three great classes. Lesser
divisions of systems, deposits, beds, and strata may exist; but the
master divisions, as he calls them, are simply those three which even
the unpractised eye can detect--the Palæozoic, the Secondary, and the
Tertiary. The first is the period of extraordinary fauna and flora--the
period emphatically of forests and huge pines, 'the herb yielding seed
after its kind, and tree bearing fruit.' The second is the age of
monsters, reptiles, pterodactyls and ichthyosaurs, 'the fowl that
flieth above the earth, the great sea-monsters and winged fowl after
its kind.' The Tertiary period is that of 'the beasts of the earth and
the cattle after their kind.' In each age, it is true, there is a
twilight period, a period of morning-dawn and evening-decline; but in
the middle of each period it is that we find the great outstanding
features above. Thus there would be no contradictions in the record.
This, it must be allowed, summarises truly enough the process of
creation; but it leaves out of sight the invertebrata and early fishes
of the first period, and regards the succeeding carboniferous era as
the leading features, while perhaps in some subordinate details it
inverts the order of other appearances.
To the wider objection to the Biblical record, with its light before
the creation of the sun upon the fourth day, the vegetation on the
third independent of the sun's warming rays, and to other real or
supposed contradictions, Miller has a highly ingenious reply. We do not
think it fully meets the necessities of the case, but it has
unquestionably the merit of imaginative power, and is in full harmony
with the nature of man's mind, and is therefore preferable to any
theory which would assert the exact science of the Mosaic record by its
anticipation of the theory of Laplace and Herschel, by which the earth
existed before the sun was given as a luminary, and was independent of
the sun for light. Perhaps the theory of progressive revelation will
commend itself to most as the truest and the simplest explanation,
though it should be noted that the extraordinary approximation of the
Biblical version to the latest science does really set it far above the
merely human speculation of some old Hebrew Newton or Descartes.
While regarding the 'days' as ages, Miller views the record as the
result of an _optical vision_ presented to the writer. He truly
enough remarks that any exact revelation would have defeated its own
object through an elaborate statement to man at an early stage. Man
would not have believed it, as it would have contradicted his own
experience. He would no more have believed that the earth revolved on
its own axis than that molluscs had preceded him on the earth. The
record, therefore, he regards as according to appearance rather than to
physical realities: 'The sun, moon, and stars may have been created
long before, though it was not until the fourth day of creation that
they became visible from the earth's surface.' The six days or periods
he takes to correspond with the six divisions in a successive series of
the Azoic, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Oolitic, and Tertiary
ages. To the human eye of the seer, the second day would afford nothing
to divert it from the atmospheric phenomena; on the fourth the
celestial phenomena would alone be so prominent as to call for specific
mention. But, familiar to most readers as the famous passage is, we
here present it as the best example of his descriptive and imaginative
powers. If there are to be reconciliations at all, as either necessary
or desirable, it would be hard to beat this fine piece of fused
strength and imagination.[4]
[4] _Testimony of the Rocks_, pp. 186-191, ed. 1857.
'Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one
given by Milton of that vision of the future which he represents as
conjured up before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather
for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or
sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man,
in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of
the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of
St. John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as
certainly addressed as the eye. A "great darkness" first falls upon
the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham,
but without the "horror"; and as the Divine Spirit moves on the
face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped
by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that
"in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision to a few brief moments,
pass away; the creative word is again heard, "Let there be light,"
and straightway a grey diffused light springs up in the east, and,
casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming,
vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One
heavy sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint
light waxes fainter--it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon;
the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits a
while on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what
seems to be a calm and starless night.
'The light again brightens--it is day; and over an expanse of
ocean, without visible bound, the horizon has become wider and
sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great
sea--invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the
comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet,
only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and
fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most
strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in
the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied
in the previous vision by seething steam, or grey, smoke-like fog,
is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the
previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the
cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the
atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold--an upper sea of great
waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament,
and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A
mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most
conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent
atmosphere--of a firmament stretched out over the earth, that
separates the water above from the waters below. But darkness
descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the
morning have completed the second day.
'Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud, but the scene
has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The
white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef,
formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages
before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of
foam, nearer at hand, against the low, winding shore, the seaward
barrier of a widely-spread country. For at the Divine command the
land has arisen from the deep--not inconspicuously and in scattered
islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and
marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet
further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora.
The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees--of palms
and tree-ferns, and gigantic club-mosses, on the opener slopes, and
of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark
rolling rivers. There is a deep gloom in the recesses of the
thicker woods, and low, thick mists creep along the dank marsh or
sluggish streams. But there is a general lightening of the sky
overhead; as the day declines, a redder flash than had hitherto
lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long
withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the
prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on, and the fourth day
approaches, that yet another change has taken place.
'The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of
deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning
pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze
into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the
glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course
rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer
blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with
little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of richer
green; and as the sun declines amid ever richer glories than those
which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full-orbed in the
east,--to the human eye the second great luminary of the
heavens,--and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances,
shedding its mild radiance on land and sea.
'Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land
and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide
plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines
over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a
feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or
wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while
birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in
hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening,
over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their
wings the thick woods.
'And ocean has its monsters: great _tanninim_ tempest the deep,
as they heave their huge bulk over the surface to inhale the
life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out
of "a seething pot or caldron." Monstrous creatures, armed in
massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows;
earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun
sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues
unremittingly its few simple ends--the support and preservation of
the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection
and maintenance of the young.
'Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and
morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and
beasts of the field graze on the plains; the thick-skinned
rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles
among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of
elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods;
while animals of fiercer nature--the lion, the leopard, and the
bear--harbour in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for
their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. At
length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the
responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is
introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases for ever
upon the earth.
'The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet
another morrow--the morrow of God's rest--that divine Sabbath in
which there is no more creative labour, and which, "blessed and
sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its
special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And
over _it_ no evening is represented in the record as falling, for
its special work is not yet complete. Such seems to have been the
sublime panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to
"The Shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos";
and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that
militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its
details.'
The _Origin of Species_ in 1859 was issued after Miller's death, but
the leading doctrines of Darwin were not unknown before that time to
the public through the appearance of Robert Chambers's _Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation_ in 1844, and a subsequent volume of
'Explanations' in 1846. This book caused almost as considerable a stir
as that of Darwin himself, and the greatest care was taken by Chambers
to conceal the authorship. The proof-sheets sent to Mr. Ireland in
Manchester, were returned to the writer, who reforwarded them to
Ireland, who in his turn despatched them to London. The guesses at the
author ranged from Sir Charles Lyell up to the Prince Consort; and so
strong were the feelings aroused that they defeated a proposal to bring
in Chambers as Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1848, and the secret was
not formally divulged till the issue by Ireland in 1884 of a twelfth
edition. The book is written in a 'powerful and brilliant style,' as
Darwin says; and, though long out of print, its re-issue by Routledge
and Son in their Universal Library has again drawn attention to its
views, which in Scotland caused something of the stir produced by the
appearance in England of _Essays and Reviews_. Chambers, indeed,
regarded his book as 'the first attempt to connect the natural sciences
into a history of creation. As such, it must necessarily be crude and
unsatisfactory, yet I have thought the time was come for attempting to
weave a great generalisation out of established natural truths.' Much
of the popular ideas or misconceptions about the geological record is
due to the _Vestiges_. It is not very strong in logic nor exact in
individual branches of science, yet its influence fully merited the
detailed reply by Miller, in 1847, in the _Footprints of the Creator_,
which he appropriately dedicated to Sir Philip Egerton, the highest
authority on fossil fishes.
Chambers and his school had largely subscribed to the doctrines of
Oken, by which no organism had been created of larger size than an
infusorial point, and no organism created which was not microscopic;
whatever exists larger, man himself included, having been developed and
not created. To this Miller replies that this at least is not the
testimony of the rocks. If it were true, it would follow that the
oldest fossils would be small, and low in organisation. But, so far is
this from being the case that the oldest organisms, whether that be the
_asterolepis_ or the _cephalaspidæ_ or the _acanthidæ_, are large and
high. One asterolepis found at Thurso measures over twelve feet, and a
Russian specimen described by Professor Asmus of Dorpat seems to have
reached the astonishing length of twenty-three feet. Thus, the earliest
organisms 'instead of taking their place, agreeably to the demands of
the development hypothesis, among the sprats, sticklebacks, and minnows
of their class, took their place among its huge and basking sharks,
gigantic sturgeons, and bulky sword-fishes. They were giants, not
dwarfs.'
The prevalence of the brachiopods in the Silurian period over the
_cephalaspidæ_ proves little. What the naturalist has to deal with
is not quantity but quality, 'not the number of the low, but the
standing of the high. A country may be distinctly a country of flocks
and herds, or a country of carnivorous mammalia, or like New South
Wales or the Galapagos, a country of marsupial animals or of reptiles.
Its human inhabitants may be merely a few hunters or shepherds, too
inconsiderable in numbers to give it any peculiar standing as a home of
men. But in estimating the highest point in the scale to which the
animal kingdom has attained, it is of the few men, not of its many
beasts, that we must take note.' Thus he maintains that the existence
of a single cephalopod or one cuttlefish among a wilderness of
brachiopods is sufficient to indicate the mark already attained in the
scale of being, just as the existence of the human family, when
restricted to a pair, indicated as clearly the scale as when its
existence can be counted by millions. Under the clearing-system in the
Western Highlands, Miller had, during 'the cruise of the Betsey,'
noticed in the island of Rum a single shepherd and eight thousand
sheep. Yet the human unit, to the naturalist, would outweigh all the
lower organisms. Moreover, the brachiopods of the palæozoic age he
would regard as larger than those existing now which have sunk by
'degradation' into inferior importance.
The proof of the development theory in the realm of fossil flora he
would regard as still more questionable. It had been asserted that in
the carboniferous age no exogenous plant had appeared; that before the
Lias nature had not succeeded in producing a tree, and that the
vegetation of the coal-measures had been 'magnificent immaturities' of
the vegetable kingdom. But the quarry of Craigleith, near Edinburgh,
alone would refute it, not to speak of the coal-fields of Dalkeith and
Falkirk with their araucarians and pines. While Brongniart had denied
to the Lower 'Old Red' anything higher than a lichen or a moss, 'the
ship carpenter might have hopefully taken axe in hand, to explore the
woods for some such stately pine as the one described by Milton:
"Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral."'
It might be thought, however, that to the geological argument from
development some consolation might be left from the general fact of the
lower producing the higher. Yet even here the Lamarckian theory fails.
Fishes were earlier than the beasts of the field and man. But we are
still a long way from any proof that 'the peopling of the earth was one
of a natural kind, requiring time'; or that the predecessors of man
were his progenitors. So far as geology is concerned, superposition is
not parental relation, so that there is no necessity for the lower
producing the higher. Nor has transmutation of marine into terrestrial
vegetation been proved. This had been the mainstay of the Lamarckian
hypothesis, and had been adopted from the brilliant but fancifully
written _Telliamed_ (an anagram, by the way, of the author's name) of
De Maillet by both Oken and Chambers, who had found in the _Delphinidæ_
the marine progenitors of the _Simiadæ_, and through them of man--a
curious approximation to some recent crude ideas of Professor Drummond
in his _Ascent of Man_. They had pointed to the general or supposed
agreement in fauna and flora between the Galapagos and South America,
between the Cape de Verde Islands and Africa; yet in such a period of
conversion plants of an intermediate character would be found, and
thousands of years have failed to produce such a specimen. Thus
geology, botany, and zoology would seem to afford slight support to the
Darwinian theory, at least in the state of the argument as presented in
the _Vestiges_, unless a very large draft upon the mere imagination is
made.
And such a demand is made by Darwin. 'If,' says he, 'my theory be true,
it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was
deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer
than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and
that, during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time, the world
teemed with living creatures.' This, however, we may say with the
Regent Morton, is only 'a devout imagination'; and it might be more
scientific to take the geological record as we find it, for, says
Miller, 'it is difficult to imagine that that uniform cessation of
organised life at one point, which seems to have conducted Sir Roderick
Murchison and Professor Sedgwick to their conclusion, should thus have
been a mere effect of accident. Accident has its laws, but uniformity
is not one of them; and should the experience be invariable, as it
already seems extensive, that immediately beneath the fucoidal beds
organic remains cease, I do not see how the conclusion is to be
avoided, that they represent the period in which, at least, _existences
capable of preservation_ were first introduced.' Indeed the hypothesis
of Darwin would fall under the remark of Herodotus, that the old
theorisers and speculators at the last resort betook themselves to a
belief in an imaginary ocean-river or to something in the interior of
the earth where observation was of necessity excluded. For, as
Professor Bain says, the assertion of a fact wholly beyond the reach of
evidence for or against, is to be held as untrue: we are not obliged to
show that a thing is not,--the burden lies on them who maintain that
the thing is.
We have said that those who ultimately live in each branch of science
are few. It is only by the combination in perfection of imagination and
observation that success is ensured. Miller had noticed in the writer
of the _Vestiges_ the absence of original observation and abstract
thinking, or the power of seeing and reasoning for himself. In truth,
there is something in geological speculation akin to what Professor
Jebb has noticed in the field of classical emendation and of textual
criticism, especially in Germany, where scholarship is a crowded
profession, and eminence is often temporarily won by boldness of
handling the texts. But even Ritschl, with all his heavy apparatus of
learning, singularly fails in comparison with the sagacity of Bentley
or the instinct of Porson. What habits of classical verse-composition
had done for these scholars is brought to the geologist by observation.
This, in unison with creative mental power, will alone preserve the
name of the natural scientist. The first has kept White of Selborne a
literary evergreen: the second has maintained his place for Cuvier.
Miller's own friend, Dr. Longmuir, rightly singles out this
Champollion-like trait of _sagacity_ as his most characteristic
feature, by which 'he seemed by intuition to perceive what cost other
minds no small amount of careful investigation.' He was very cautious
in statement, and laborious in the acquisition of his data. In his
works the reader will find no second-hand statements, no airy
generalisation; even in fields where special research in minute
departments had been by circumstances denied to him, his gift of
constructive imagination often enables him to supply such defects as
later investigators may have detected and added. 'The more,' says
Professor Huxley, I study the fishes of the Old Red, the more I am
struck by the patience and sagacity manifested in his researches, and
by the natural insight which, in his case, seems to have supplied the
want of special anatomical knowledge.'
And what is true in science is also no less true in his purely literary
performances. The reader of his articles, political or social, cannot
fail to be struck with the pertinence of his quotations and
illustrations. What he knew was instantly at the call of a powerful
memory and a vigorous imagination. As an editor, he had not to go to
memory for his metaphors, and to his imagination for his facts. Both
came easily and naturally; and his writing, even in its most sustained
flights, shows no signs of effort. Some critics have detected in his
style an element of exuberance; and this may be allowed in his
narrative and descriptive passages. There would appear to have been, as
it were, a Celtic lobe of imagination in his mind for the feeling of
discursive description and external nature. Thus, in his slightest
landscapes his imagination or eye is not satisfied with the few bold
touches such as Carlyle would, after his manner, throw upon the canvas.
It expands, like the method of Ruskin, over the surface. But in each
case the defect is the result of original endowment. The eye, he says,
had been in his case exclusively trained as a mason, and this habit of
seeing the projected line complete from the beginning was at the bottom
of his often spoiling the effect of his narrative with flamboyant
additions, through his possession of the geological eye for its
conformation in detail. Johnson said of Thomson that he had a true
poetical genius--the power of seeing even a pair of candles in a
poetical light. The landscape became to Miller at once anatomised into
its geological aspects.
But in his strictly scientific passages this is not so. There the style
is simple in expression and close in reasoning. When we consider the
great amount of solid literary performance, and of minute observation,
recorded in his _Cruise of the Betsey_ and his _Rambles of a
Geologist_, extending over the West Coast and the Orkneys--when we
know that much of his work consisted of papers in _The Witness_,
republished, like _The Old Red Sandstone_, in book form with the
necessary additions, we shall wonder at the fertility and the quickness
of the mind that could, in the midst of distracting journalistic
demands on his time and attention, produce such a mass of varied and
finished work in science and literature. And of the work in _The
Witness_ as a political writer, we need only say that the present
ecclesiastical condition of Scotland bears largely his impress. Till he
came and gave expression to the feeling of the country in the columns
of his paper, the people had to a considerable extent believed the
question at issue to be one that concerned mainly the clergy. This had
been the standpoint of the Moderate organs, in a wary attempt to win
over the laity. But by the _Letter to Brougham_ he won the ear of the
people, and to the end he never lost it. By 1841 the political
candidates in Scotland at the general election had proclaimed
themselves, with a single exception, in favour of some distinct
alteration of the law of patronage. Whether Church papers are or are
not a blessing--in England they have become a menace to political
action and a medium for the most offensive clericalism and reactionary
measures--may safely be left out of account in settling the question in
his own case, for, as we have seen, he had never consented to make his
paper a merely ecclesiastical organ. But of the work which he
accomplished as a leader-writer and as an exponent of popular rights we
have the unhesitating estimate of Guthrie: 'The battle of Christ's
rights as Head of the Church, and of the people's rights as members of
the body of which He is the Head, was fought and won in every town and
a large number of the parishes of Scotland, mainly by Hugh Miller,
through the columns of _The Witness_ newspaper.' Of it he himself, in
the closing sentences of the _Schools and Schoolmasters_, could say
with modesty that it took its place among our first-class Scottish
newspapers, and that it numbered among its subscribers a larger
percentage of readers with a university education than any other. Nor
would he, perhaps, have considered it as among the least of his
journalistic successes that his name and connection could win for the
elder Bethune, at the close of his wintry day, the proposed editorship
of the _Dumfries Standard_, which would have done much to have
brightened the life of his old fellow-contributor to Wilson's _Border
Tales_ had not the poet been removed before him by death.
In science there are stars and stars, to borrow the adage of Thackeray
upon men. There are stars that are fixed. In his own line of geology,
as an inspirationist, we think his name will not soon pass away. There
may be defects of knowledge, but there is no defect of spirit; and here
we cannot do better than set down the opinion of his friend, Sir
Archibald Geikie, who has a connection both with Miller and with
Murchison through his occupancy of the Murchisonian Chair of Geology in
the University of Edinburgh. Both Miller and Murchison came out of the
Black Isle. In a communication to us of the date 22nd December 1895, he
thus writes:--
'Hugh Miller will always occupy a peculiar place in the history of
geology, and in the ranks of geological literature. He was not in
any sense a trained geologist. He lacked the habit of patient and
detailed investigation in departments of the science that did not
specially interest him, but which were essential as a basis of
accurate induction and successful speculation. In all that relates
to the stratigraphical sequence of the formations, for example, he
accepted what had been done by others without any critical
examination of it. Thus, in his own region--the north of
Scotland--he believed that a girdle of Old Red Sandstone nearly
encircles the older crystalline rocks of Ross and Sutherland--a
view then generally adopted. Yet he had actually walked over ground
where, with even an elementary knowledge of structural geology, he
could have corrected the prevalent error. It is, of course, no
reproach to him that he left matters as he found them in that
respect; his genius did not find in such questions the appropriate
field of its exertion.
'Nor though he occupied himself all through his life with fossils,
can he be called a palæontologist. He had no education in
comparative anatomy, and was thus incompetent to deal adequately as
a naturalist with the organisms which he discovered. He was himself
perfectly conscious of the limitations of his powers in this
department, and thus wisely refrained from burdening the literature
of science with descriptions and names which would have been
revised, and perhaps entirely recast, by some subsequent more
competent biologist.
'Hugh Miller's unique position is that of a poetic student of the
geological side of Nature, who possessed an unrivalled gift of
vividly communicating to others the impressions made on his own
mind by the observation of geological fact and by the inferences
which such observation seemed to warrant. His lively imagination
led him to seize more especially on those aspects of the past
history of the earth which could be most vividly realised. He loved
to collect the plants and animals of which the remains have been
entombed among the rocks, and to re-people with them the scenes in
which they lived long ages ago. Each scattered fact was marshalled
by his eager fancy into its due place in the mental picture which
he drew of such long-vanished lands, lakes, rivers, and seas. His
enthusiasm supplied details where facts were wanting, and enabled
him to kindle in his readers not a little of the burning interest
which he felt himself.
'Long study of the best English literature had given Miller a rare
mastery of his mother tongue. For elegance of narrative combined
with clearness and vividness of description, I know no writing in
the whole of scientific literature superior, or, indeed, perhaps
equal to his. There can be no doubt that this literary gift,
appealing as it did to so wide a circle of readers, formed a chief
source of the influence which he exerted among his contemporaries.
It was this that enabled him to spread so widely a curiosity to
know something of geological science, and an interest in the
progress of geological discovery. I do not think that the debt
which geology owes to him for these services, in deepening the
popular estimation of the science, and in increasing the number of
its devotees, has ever been sufficiently acknowledged. During his
lifetime, and for some years afterwards, Hugh Miller was looked
upon by the general body of his countrymen as the leading geologist
of his day. And this exaggerated but very natural estimate spread
perhaps even more extensively in the United States. His books were
to be found in the remotest log-hut of the Far West, and on both
sides of the Atlantic ideas of the nature and scope of geology were
largely drawn from them.
'Of the extent and value of Miller's original contributions to
geology I am, perhaps, hardly fitted to speak. He was one of my
earliest and kindest scientific friends. He used to relate to me
the results of his summer rambles before he had time to set them
down in writing. He admitted me into the intimacy of his inner
thoughts on geological questions and controversies. He brought me
completely under the spell of his personal charm, and filled me
with an enthusiastic love for the man as well as a passionate
admiration for the geologist. Nor has the glamour of that early
friendship passed away. I would rather leave to others the
invidious task of coldly dissecting Hugh Miller's work and seeing
how much of it has been a permanent addition to science, and how
much has passed away with the crudities of advancing knowledge. I
will only say that there cannot be any doubt that his contributions
to the stock of geological fact were much less important than the
influence which his writings ever had in furthering the spread of
an appreciation of geological science throughout the
English-speaking world.
'There were two departments in which his best original work was
done. One of these was the Old Red Sandstone, where he laid the
foundations of his fame as an observer and describer of Nature. His
unwearied devotion to the task of collecting the fishes of the Old
Red Sandstone, and his patient industry in piecing their broken
fragments together, opened up a new chapter in the history of Life
on our globe. The other department was that which embraces the
story of the Ice Age. Miller was one of the pioneers in the study
of the Boulder-Clay. The last years of his life were more
especially devoted to that interesting formation in which he found
fossil shells in many parts of Scotland where they had never been
found before. I well remember my last interview with him, only a
few evenings before his death. He had spent a short holiday in the
low ground about Bucklyvie between the Forth and Clyde, and had
collected a number of marine shells, which led him to draw a
graphic picture of what must have been the condition of central
Scotland during a part of the glacial period. On the same occasion
he questioned me as usual about my own geological doings. I had
been surveying in detail the geological structure of Arthur's Seat
at Edinburgh, and showed him my maps. He went over them with lively
comments, and, when he had done, turned round to his eldest
daughter, then a girl at school, and gave her in his own pictorial
way a sketch of the history of the volcano that had piled up the
picturesque hill on the eastern outskirts of the city.
'I count it as one of the privileges of my life to have known Hugh
Miller, and as one of its chief losses that he was so suddenly
removed when I had hardly realised the full value of his friendship
and of his genial enthusiasm. His writings formed my earliest
geological text-books, and I shall never cease to look back upon
their influence with gratitude. They ought to be far more widely
read than they seem now to be. Assuredly no young geologist will
find more stimulating chapters than those penned by the author of
the _Old Red Sandstone_.'
The statue erected to him by his countrymen presents to the eye of the
traveller one of the most striking features of the landscape as he
approaches the little town of Cromarty. No more fitting scene could be
found than that which commands the magnificent sweep of water over
which Miller's eye had ranged when a boy. Of the Scott Monument in
Edinburgh he had said that no monument could be in keeping and in
character that was not Gothic; and no one to himself could be true that
forgot the interpreter of the Old Red Sandstone. As late as 1836,
Buckland in his _Bridgewater Treatise_ had briefly dismissed it, and
it was a new revelation in geology to make known its scientific
importance. In dedicating the book to Sir Roderick Murchison, who had
been born at Taradale on the Beauly Firth in 1792, he could say that
Smith, the father of English geology, had been born upon the Oolite:
they, he added, had been born upon the Old Red. Rarely could nature
afford a more striking example of the true and the picturesque, than in
these two widely differing memorials, the one in the Princes Street of
his 'own romantic town,' the other looking over the expanse of the
Cromarty Firth. In life these men had never met, and in type they were
totally distinct. Yet in the great features of integrity and force of
character no two men could more strikingly agree. Both wrote with their
eyes on the object, and both were loyal to fact. Of Miller we may say
what Carlyle had said of Sir Walter, that no sounder piece of British
manhood had been put together in this century of time, and that, when
he departed, he took a man's life along with him.
A man of the people, he was understood by the people; and he wished it
to be so. When we passed through the Sutors of Cromarty some years ago,
about six in the morning of a fine summer day, there was a sailor at
the wheel on the bridge. Under the belief that we were strangers to the
locality, he pointed out the statue in the distance and gave an
account, correct in the main, of what Miller had been and what he had
done. In dwelling upon the life the narrator seemed to borrow respect
for the dignity of all labour and of his own calling. Goldsmith thought
of Burke that in giving up to party what was meant for mankind he had
narrowed his mental powers and lessened his influence and force. It may
be that there are some who think that, in doing the ecclesiastical work
which he accomplished, he had given up to the Church of Scotland in all
her branches what was meant for science. Such a judgment would be
incorrect; it would certainly be one which would but feebly reflect the
convictions of all Scotchmen. It is a true remark of the elder Disraeli
that few men of science have either by their work or in their life
influenced the staple of the thinking of humanity. To influence a whole
people is certainly given but rarely to any one man. But to mould the
opinions of his countrymen in a lasting sense,--and no higher object
would he have desired--was no less certainly given to Hugh Miller.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1829. Poems written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason.
_Inverness._
1829. Letters on the Herring Fishery. _Inverness_ (reprint from
_Inverness Courier_).
1835. Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland; or, The Traditional
History of Cromarty. _Edinburgh._
1839. Letter from one of the Scottish People to the Right Hon. Lord
Brougham and Vaux, on the opinions expressed by his lordship on the
Auchterarder case. _Edinburgh._
1839. The Whiggism of the Old School as exemplified by the Past History
and Present Position of the Church of Scotland. _Edinburgh._
1841. The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field.
_Edinburgh_ (republished from _Witness_).
1847. First Impressions of England and its People. _Edinburgh._
1847. Footprints of the Creator; or, the Asterolepis of Stromness.
_London_, 1849.
1848. The Sites Bill and the Toleration Laws; being an Examination of
the Resolutions of the Rev. Dr. Alexander of Argyle Square Chapel
Congregation. _Edinburgh._
1848. Geology of the Bass Rock (section contributed to M'Crie's
_History of the Bass Rock_). _Edinburgh._
1850. Thoughts on Education. _Edinburgh_ (republished from _Witness_.)
1852. My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, the Story of My Education
(_Edinburgh_, 1854). _Popular_ edition by W. P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell,
_Edinburgh_, 1893.
1854. The Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. _Edinburgh_ (address
to Royal Physical Society, 22 Nov. 1854).
1855. Geology versus Astronomy; or, the Conditions and the Periods;
being a view of the Modifying Effects of Geological Discovery on the
Old Astronomic Inferences respecting the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds.
_Glasgow._
1857. The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its bearing on the
Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. _Edinburgh_ (Twelve lectures
before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, British Association, 1855,
etc.).
1858. The Cruise of the Betsey; or, A Summer Ramble among the
Fossiliferous Deposits of the Highlands; with Rambles of a Geologist,
or Ten Thousand Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland.
Edited by W. S. Symonds. _Edinburgh._
1859. Sketch Book of Popular Geology. Edited by Mrs. Miller. (Lectures
delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh.)
_Edinburgh._
1862. Essays. Edited by Dr. P. Bayne (republished from _Witness_).
1863. Tales and Sketches. Edited by Mrs. Miller (contributions to
Wilson's _Border Tales_, etc.).
1864. Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood. Edited by Mrs. Miller.
_Edinburgh_, 1891. W. P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell.
1889. The Headship of Christ and the Rights of the Christian People.
With preface by Dr. P. Bayne. _Edinburgh_, new edition, Nimmo, Hay
& Mitchell.
1890. Leading Articles. Edited by his Son-in-law, the Rev. John
Davidson. New edition, _Edinburgh_, W. P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell.
The following list of a uniform edition of Hugh Miller's Works is
taken from Messrs. W. P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell's 1896 Catalogue:--
My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, The Story of my Education.
The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two
Theologies, Natural and Revealed. _Profusely Illustrated._
First Impressions of England and its People.
Sketch-Book of Popular Geology.
Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland; or, The Traditional
History of Cromarty.
The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field. _Profusely
Illustrated._
The Cruise of the Betsey; or, A Summer Ramble among the Fossiliferous
Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist; or, Ten Thousand
Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland.
Footprints of the Creator; or, The Asterolepis of Stromness. With
Preface and Notes by Mrs. Miller, and a Biographical Sketch by
Professor Agassiz. _Profusely Illustrated._
Tales and Sketches. Edited, with a Preface, by Mrs. Miller.
Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood, Geological and Historical. With the
Geology of the Bass Rock.
Essays: Historical and Biographical, Political and Social, Literary and
Scientific.
Leading Articles on Various Subjects. Edited by his Son-in-law, the
Rev. John Davidson. With a Characteristic Portrait of the Author,
facsimile from a Photograph, by D. O. Hill, R.S.A.
The Headship of Christ and the Rights of the Christian People. With
Preface by Peter Bayne, A.M.
_FAMOUS SCOTS_
THOMAS CARLYLE
BY HECTOR C. MACPHERSON
'One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far
outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which we are
familiar.'--_Literary World._
'We heartily congratulate author and publishers on the happy
commencement of this admirable enterprise.'--_British Weekly._
'As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy and of Carlyle's place
in literature and his influence in the domains of morals, politics,
and social ethics, the volume reveals not only care and fairness,
but insight and a large capacity for original thought and
judgment.'--_Scotsman._
'Lets us get a correct glimpse into the complex workings of a
master-mind, and is lighted up by many airy touches of fact and
fancy.'--_Weekly Free Press._
'A fascinating story of a wonderful writer.'--_Leeds Mercury._
'An eminently readable book.'--_Evening Dispatch._
'Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national
series such as they have projected.'--_Glasgow Daily Record._
'The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking
manner.'--_Educational News._
ALLAN RAMSAY
BY OLIPHANT SMEATON
'Graphic and winning.'--_Dundee Advertiser._
'Gives many quaint and pleasant glimpses of Scottish life in the last
century.'--_Newcastle Chronicle._
'A most interesting monograph.'--_Arbroath Herald._
'Discussing Ramsay as a pastoral poet and elegist, the biographer gives
an able analysis of his chief writings. The whole book is, indeed,
marked by authority and ability.'--_Banffshire Journal._
'A new and most important addition to our national biography.'--_Scottish
Notes and Queries._
'Eminently readable.'--_Border Advertiser._
'The story throughout is told with vigour.'--_Glasgow Citizen._
'Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well as
a well-balanced estimate and review of his works.'--_Peoples Friend._
'The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his
task.'--_Edinburgh Dispatch._
'The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr.
Smeaton's pages.'--_Daily Record._
'A careful and intelligent study.'--_Glasgow Herald._
'A very capable piece of literary craftsmanship by a competent
hand.'--_Edinburgh Evening News._
'It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the worker, taking
genuine interest in his subject and bestowing conscientious pains on
his task, has his materials well in hand, and has used them to produce
a portrait that is both lifelike and well-balanced.'--_Scotsman._