FOOTNOTES:

[11] The terms _à priori_ and _à posteriori_ are misleading. Arguments

called _à priori_ are usually mixed, and involve elements strictly _à

posteriori_: experiential facts are inlaid within them. And the proof

_à posteriori_ ascends (if it ascends high enough) by the aid of _à

priori_ principles. In its rise to the supersensible, it makes use of

the noetic principle of the reason.

[12] For other contributions we are indebted to the historians of

philosophy (see especially Buhle) and of Christian doctrine, such as

Neander and Hagenbach, and to one of the cleverest of French thinkers,

Rémusat, who, in his 'Philosophie Religieuse,' has acutely criticised

some of the developments of opinion since the rise of modern

philosophy, and more especially some of the latest phenomena of

British and Continental thought.

[13] And a _possible_ explanation is of no use. It must be the _only

possible_ one, or it has no theistic value. It merely brings the

hypothesis of deity within the limits of the conceivable.

[14] 'I would rather call it,' says John Smith in his 'Select

Discourses,' (1660), alluding to this intuition, 'were I to speak

precisely, I would rather call it ὁρμὴν πρὸς τὸν Θεὸν, than, with

Plutarch, Θεοῦ νόησιν.'

[15] There are sundry elements in every intuition on which we do not

here enlarge, as they are necessary features rather than criteria,

characteristics rather than tests. Two of them may be merely

stated--1. Every intuition is ultimate, and carries its own evidence

within itself: it cannot appeal to any higher witness beyond itself;

and 2. The fact or facts which it proclaims, while irreducible by

analysis, must be incapable of any other explanation.

[16] Similarly with the action of the infinite and absolute _cause_.

The creative energy of that cause is not inconsistent with its

changelessness. To say so, is to introduce a quantitative notion

into a sphere when quality is alone to be considered. A cause in

action is the force which determines the changes which occur in time.

But the _primum mobile_, the first cause, need not be itself changed

by the forthputting of its causal power.

[17] 'I take the notion of a cause,' said Dr. Thomas Reid, in a letter

to Dr. Gregory, 'to be derived from the power I feel in myself to

produce certain effects. _In this sense_ we say that the Deity is the

cause of the universe.'--(Works, Hamilton's Edition, p. 77).

[18] As one who sustains a fatherly relation is at the same time son,

brother, citizen, member of a commonwealth, and member of a

profession; or, as we describe a being of compound nature, such as

man, who is both body and soul, by the higher term of the two.

[19] We use this word according to its ancient meaning, as descriptive

of the way in which the inspired soul of a prophet or a poet 'became

possessed of his truths,' in distinction from his other function as an

'utterer of truths.' And we refer only to those poets who, as

'utterers of truth,' have spoken of the spiritual presences of nature,

amongst whom, Wordsworth is chief.

[20] De l'Existence de Dieu. Part II. ch. i. s. 29.

[21] Theism, pp. 13, 14.

ART. III.--_Hugh Miller._--(1). _Life and Letters of Hugh Miller._ By

PETER BAYNE, A.M. 2 vols. Strahan and Co. (2). _Works of Hugh Miller._

Nimmo.

What strikes us as most admirable in Hugh Miller is, that he was a man

of genius and yet a man of sense. There has been, and will be,

diversity of opinion as to the value or even the existence of his

genius, but there can be no doubt as to the robust and masculine

character of his mind. When we think of him we recall what Macaulay

said of Cromwell, 'He was emphatically a man.' He possessed, in an

eminent degree, that 'equally-diffused intellectual health' which can

no more be acquired by effort or artifice than a sound physical

constitution can be obtained by the use of drugs. So often, of late,

has genius been freakish, whimsical, fantastic--evinced a perverse

contempt for the moderation and equipoise of truth--substituted

feminine vehemence of assertion for clear statement and rational

inference--nay, seemed to hover on the very verge of madness--that we

are disposed to accommodate ourselves to considerable defect in

startling and meteoric qualities on the part of one who, while

veritably possessing genius, was distinguished for sagacity,

manliness, and the avoidance of extremes.

But was Hugh Miller a man of genius? We see not how any but an

affirmative answer can be returned to the question. Metaphysical

people may perplex themselves with attempts to define genius, but no

practical evil can ensue from the application of the word 'genius' to

qualities of mind, unique either in nature or in degree. It is correct

to speak of mathematical genius when we mean an altogether

extraordinary capacity for solving mathematical problems. It is

correct to speak of poetical genius when we mean an inborn tunefulness

of nature which awakens to vocal melody at the sight of beauty or the

touch of pathos. When we say Hugh Miller was a man of genius, we mean

that, take him all in all, in his life, in his character, in his

books, he was unique. In a remote Highland village, one of the

quietest, least important places in the world, amid a simple,

ruminating population, with no Alpine grandeur of surrounding scenery

or stirring memorials of local life, the sea-captain's son is born.

Nothing in the history of his father's house for generations affords

suggestion of an hereditary gift of expression; and though his mother

had a fund of ghost-stories and delighted to tell them, she passed

among her neighbours for an entirely undistinguished, commonplace

woman. And yet, before he was ten years old, the child Hugh would

quit his boyish companions for the sea-shore, and there saunter for

hours, pouring forth blank-verse effusions about sea-fights, ghosts,

and desert islands. A peculiar imaginative susceptibility and a

passion for expression revealed themselves in him from his infancy.

The strong bent of his nature regulated his education. He is

bookish--his fairy tales, voyages, 'Pilgrim's Progress,' Bible

stories, afford him enchanting pleasure--but he will pay no attention

to the books which his schoolmaster puts into his hand. He is the

dunce of the school, yet his class-fellows hang on his lips while he

charms them with extemporised narratives, and in the wood and the

caves he is acknowledged as the leader of them all. His mind is ever

open; at every moment knowledge is streaming in upon him; but the

whole method of his intellectual growth is conditioned from within,

through the peremptory determinations of his inborn spiritual force

and personality. At all hours he is an observer of nature, and

acquires, without knowing it, a perfect familiarity with every living

thing--bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, as well as with every tree,

plant, flower, and stone, which are to be met with from the pine-wood

on the cliff, to the wet sand left by the last wave of the retreating

tide upon the shore. He thus grows up a naturalist. With a mind

opulently furnished, and well acquainted even with books, he

nevertheless finds himself, when his boyhood and early youth are

spent, entirely unqualified to proceed to College. He chooses the

trade of a mason, but the irresistible bent of his nature is obeyed

even in this choice, for he knew that masons in the Highlands of

Scotland did not work in the winter months, and in these he would

betake himself to his beloved pen. For fifteen years he worked as a

mason, earning his bread by steady, effective labour, but aware all

the time of a power within him, a force of giant mould imprisoned

beneath the mountain of adverse circumstance, which, he doubted not,

would one day make itself known to the world. This vague prophecy in

his heart, which surely was the voice of his genius speaking within

him, was fulfilled. Sorcerers in the old time professed to show

visions of the past and future in magic mirrors; but the true magical

mirror is the mind of genius; and when Hugh Miller's contemporaries

beheld, reflected in the mirror of his mind, lifted from the profound

obscurity in which they had formerly slept and set in vivid clearness

before the eyes of the world, the little town he loved, the Sutors,

the bay, the hill, they felt that the one Cromarty man of all

generations who had done this was possessed of genius. With this

decision we rest content.

The true greatness of Hugh Miller lay, however, in his moral

qualities. Here we may give our enthusiasm the rein. There was a rare

nobleness, a rare blending of magnanimity, rectitude and gentleness,

in this man. His affections were at once tender and constant, and when

you search the very deeps of his soul, you find in it no malice, no

guile, no greed, nothing which can be called base or selfish. We are

struck with admiration as we mark the high tones of his mind, his

superiority to all vulgar ambitions. There has probably been some

romancing about the peasant nobles of Scotland, but in Hugh Miller,

the journeyman mason, and in his uncles James and Sandy, the one a

saddler, the other a wood-cutter, we have three men who, so long as

the mind is the standard of the man, will be classed with the finest

type of gentleman. It is greatly to the honour of Scotland, and of the

old evangelical religion of Scotland, that she produced such men. Hugh

Miller's uncles performed for him a father's part, and he learned from

them, not so much through formal instruction as by a certain

contagion--to use the phrase in which the Londoners, a hundred years

ago, in their inscription on Blackfriars Bridge, described with

felicitous precision the manner of Pitt's influence on his

contemporaries--that sensitive uprightness, that manly independence,

and that love of nature, by which he was distinguished. The ambition

of money-making, which as it were naturally and inevitably suggests

itself to a youth of parts in an English village, never seems to have

so much as presented itself to the mind of Hugh Miller. In cultivating

the spiritual faculties of his soul, in adding province after province

to the empire of his mind, lay at once the delight and the ambition of

this young mechanic. He aspired to fame, but his conception of fame

was pure and lofty. Of the vanity which feeds on notoriety he had no

trace, and cared not for reputation if he could not deliberately

accept it as his due. A proud man he was; perhaps, at times, too

sternly proud; but from the myriad pains and pettinesses which have

their root in vanity, he was conspicuously free. Very beautiful also

is the unaffected delight which this rough-handed mason takes in the

aspects of nature. It has none of that sickliness or excess which

strong men admit to have more or less characterised the enthusiasm for

the freshness of spring and the splendour of summer of what has been

called the London school of poetry. In the rapture with which Keats

sang of trees and fields, there is something of the nature of

calenture. Pent in the heart of London, he thought of the crystal

brooks and the wood-hyacinths with a weeping fondness, instinct

indeed with finest melody, but akin to that sick and melancholy joy

with which the sailor in mid-ocean gazes on the waste of billows,

gazes and still gazes until on their broad green sides the little

meadow at his father's cottage door with its grey willows and white

maythorns seems to smile out on his tear-filled eyes. Had Keats run

about the hills and played in the twilight woods as a little boy, he

would not have loved nature less, but his poetical expression of that

love would not have struck masculine intellects as verging on the

lachrymose and the fantastic. Nature to Miller was a constant joy, a

part of the wonted aliment of his soul, an inspiring, elevating

influence, strengthening him for the tasks of life. 'I remember,' he

writes of the days of his youth,

'how my happiness was enhanced by every little bird that

burst out into sudden song among the trees, and then as

suddenly became silent, or by every bright-scaled fish that

went darting through the topaz-coloured depths of the

water, or rose for a moment over its calm surface,--how the

blue sheets of hyacinths that carpeted the openings in the

wood delighted me, and every golden-tinted cloud that

gleamed over the setting sun, and threw its bright flush on

the river, seemed to inform the heart of a heaven beyond.'

The mason lad who could feel thus had little to envy in the gold of

the millionaire or the title of the aristocrat. Well did the ancients

match sound and sense in that phrase, _sancta simplicitas_; such

simplicity of soul is indeed holy and healing.

The sterling worth and fine moral quality of Miller are brought out in

his relations with his friends. Of passion in the common sense he was

singularly void, and there is no evidence that, until he passed his

thirtieth year, female beauty once touched his heart. But his

affection for his friends was ardent to the degree of passion, and

constant as it was ardent. Both autobiographers and biographers are

apt to paint up the youthful friendships of their heroes, and we are

glad that Mr. Bayne has been able to verify, and more than verify, by

infallible documentary evidence, all that, in his 'Schools and

Schoolmasters,' Miller tells us of his relations to his two friends,

William Ross and John Swanson. Ross was perhaps the most finely gifted

of the three, but the circumstances of his birth were hopelessly

depressing. His parents were sunk in the lowest depths of poverty; but

this was not the worst; his constitution was so feeble that sustained

and resolute effort was for him a physical impossibility. Amid the

debility of his bodily energies there burned, with strange, sad,

piercing radiance, the flame of genius. With exquisite accuracy of

discernment he took the measure of Miller, pointing out to him where

his strength lay and where his weakness. He knew his own powers, also,

but saw that Miller had stamina while he had none; and, with tragic

pathos, accused himself of indolence and vacillation, when his only

fault was that he was dying. Delicately organised in all respects, he

displayed a musical faculty more usual among peasant boys in Italy

than in Scotland, made himself a fife and clarionet of elder-shoots,

and became one of the best flute-players in the district. From the

little damp room in which Ross slept during his apprenticeship to a

house-painter, Miller used to hear the sweet sounds on which his soul

rose for the time above all its sorrows. He had a fine appreciation,

too, of the beauty of landscape. 'I have seen him,' says Miller, 'awed

into deep solemnity, in our walks, by the rising moon, as it peered

down upon us over the hill, red and broad and cloud-encircled, through

the interstices of some clump of dark firs; and have observed him

become suddenly silent, as, emerging from the moonlight woods, we

looked into a rugged dell, and saw, far beneath, the slim rippling

streamlet gleaming in the light, like a narrow strip of the _aurora

borealis_ shot athwart a dark sky, when the steep, rough sides of the

ravine, on either hand, were enveloped in gloom.' Ross had educated

his faculty of æsthetic perception and of art-criticism by study of

Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, Fresnoy's Art of Painting, Gessner's

Letters, and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Lectures. Miller describes him as

looking constantly on nature with the eye of the artist, signalising

and selecting the characteristic beauties of the landscape. This habit

of imaginative composition would, we believe, have been fixed on by

the most accomplished instructors in the art of painting at this

moment in Europe, as the best proof that could be given by Ross of the

possession of artistic genius. Turner was at all times a composer, and

never painted a leaf with photographic correctness. But the poverty of

William Ross condemned him to the drudgery of a house-painter, and he

had no teaching in the higher departments of art. He proceeded to

Edinburgh, and thence to Glasgow, his fine talent distinguishing him

from ordinary workmen, and enabling him to procure work of such

delicacy that he could continue it when too weak to engage in the

usual tasks of house-painting. Thoughtful and kind, he assisted a

brother-workman who was dying by his side, and having shielded his

friend from want, and soothed his last moments, he followed him

speedily to the grave.

John Swanson was of a different build, physically and intellectually,

from Ross. His characteristic was energy of mind and of body. He was a

distinguished student at the University, an athlete in mathematics, an

acute metaphysician; but the mystic fire of genius, which Miller saw

in the eye of Ross, and which he believed to have fallen on himself,

threw none of its prismatic colouring over the framework of Swanson's

mind. He was the first of the three to come under strong religious

impressions. Abandoning philosophical subtleties, and accepting, with

the whole force of his robust mind, the salvation offered by Christ,

he pressed upon Miller with importunate earnestness the heavenly

treasure which himself had found. He was not at first successful.

Steady labour, indeed, in the quarry, and in the hewing shed, had

chastened the youthful wildness of Miller, and he had become, though

not religious, at least reverent and thoughtful. As Swanson's appeals

took effect, the early religious teaching of his uncles, which had

probably lain dormant in his mind, asserted its influence. He does not

appear to have been conscious of this fact, and indeed it was not the

catechetic instruction, but the personal example of his uncles, that

told upon him. At all events, after hesitating and playing shy, he was

fairly brought to a stand by Swanson; and though he underwent no

paroxysm of religious excitement, a profound change took place in his

character, a change which penetrated to the inmost depths of his

nature, changed the current of his being, and was regarded by himself

as his conversion. He was thus knit in still closer fellowship with

Swanson, and their friendship continued uninterrupted until his death.

Had his opinions not taken this shape, it seems likely that he would

have become daringly sceptical. He had assuredly, to use the words of

Coleridge, skirted the deserts of infidelity. He was familiar with the

writings of Hume, whose argument against miracles defines to this hour

the position taken up by all who, on scientific grounds deny the

supernatural origin of Christianity. There was a time when he fancied

himself an atheist, and the profane affectation might have deepened

into reality. But after his correspondence with Swanson, he never

wavered. The consideration which, from an intellectual point of view,

chiefly influenced him in pronouncing Christianity Divine, was

two-fold. Christianity, he said, was no _cunningly_ devised fable. It

offended man at too many points--it seemed too palpably to contradict

his instincts of justice--to have been invented by man. At the same

time, it was fitted, with exquisite nicety of adaptation, and with

measureless amplitude of comprehension, to meet the wants of man's

spiritual nature. Man neither would nor could have created it, any

more than he could or would have created manna; but when he took of

it, and did eat, he found that it was angels' food, making him, though

his steps were still through the wilderness of this world, the brother

of angels. Miller has not in any of his writings elaborated this idea

with the fulness of exposition, defence and illustration which the

importance of the part it played in his system of thought might render

desirable; but it is obvious that it would, for him, not only silence

the arguments which had previously seemed to tell against

Christianity, but array them on the side of belief. The more offensive

and contradictory Christianity might be to natural reason and

conscience, the stronger would be the logical chain by which he was

drawn to infer its supernatural origin. The courses of the stars might

appear to him a maze of lawless and inadmissible movements, but when

he steered his little boat by them, he was led safely across dark

billows and perilous currents; clearly, therefore, One who understood

the whole matter infinitely better than he had put together the

time-piece of the heavens. Such was his argument, and it is not

without force. Practically his religion consisted in an inexpressible

enthusiasm of devotion to Christ. The term which he uniformly applies

to the Saviour is 'The Adorable,' and he dwelt, with lingering,

wondering, rejoicing affection on the sympathy of the Man Christ Jesus

with human wants and weaknesses. Seldom have the efforts of friendship

been more nobly crowned than were those of John Swanson when this

radical change took place in the spiritual condition of Hugh Miller.

His relations with Swanson and with Ross attest the warmth and

constancy of his affections; but the gentleness of his nature does not

fully dawn upon us until we read his letters to Miss Dunbar, and

understand the friendship which subsisted between him and that lady.

She was many years his senior, and as the sister of a Scottish

Baronet, Sir Alexander Dunbar, of Boath, and a Tory of the old school,

we should have expected her to be shy of poetical masons. Something in

Miller's verses, however, attracted her, and a singularly tender and

romantic friendship sprung up between them. On his side, it was

confined to affectionate appreciation and admiring esteem; but she

wrote to him with the tenderness of a mother, and did not scruple to

tell him that he was the dearest friend she had in the world. His

letters to her are not distinguished by originality or by

extraordinary power; but they abound in delineations of nature, poetic

in their loveliness; they are just in thought, and faultless in

feeling; and in literary style they are perhaps, on the whole, the

most melodious and beautiful of his compositions. Like his other

writings these letters are full of self-portrayal, and the face which,

with pensive, fascinating smile, seems to beam on us from the page, is

that of a right noble and loveable man. We feel that this mason is a

gentleman; a gentleman of the finest strain; one whose gentleness is

of the heart, and manifests itself, not in the polished urbanity of

cities which often hides a bad and cold nature, but in a vigilant

kindness, a manly deference, and above all a delicate sympathy. The

few words of reference to Hugh Miller occurring incidentally in Dr.

McCosh's recollections of Bunsen, and published in the biography of

the latter--which, by the way, seem to us to cast a more vivid light

upon the man than the far lengthier recollections of Miller by Dr.

McCosh, printed in Mr. Bayne's biography--specify the intense

sweetness and fascination belonging to his presence. Despite his

rugged exterior, his shaggy head and rough-hewn features, his mason's

apron, his slowly enunciated speech, and his somewhat heavy manner,

this fascination was felt by all who had an opportunity of

experiencing it.

We hinted that he was singularly devoid of sensibility to the charm of

female beauty. In this respect he presents a marked contrast to Burns,

and indeed to most men of powerful intellect and vivid imagination.

But he loved once, and then he loved with all the intensity of his

nature. At the time when his name was beginning to be known through

the north of Scotland as that of one who had a future, Miss Lydia

Fraser, ten years his junior, arrived in Cromarty. She was possessed

of no small personal beauty, had received a good education, was

addicted to intellectual pursuits, wrote fluently both in prose and

verse, and was gifted with remarkable acuteness and clearness of mind.

Her temperament was more mercurial than Miller's; he was more capable

of patient thought, and, on the whole, more solidly able. It may be

doubted whether a pair thus matched enjoyed the surest prospect of

happiness in the married state, but it is evident that they were

precisely in the position to strike up a romantic friendship. He was

the literary lion of Cromarty, she the gifted beauty of the place;

their friendship and their love were as much in the order of nature

as that of Tenfelsdröckh and Blumine, though happily it had no such

tragic conclusion. The gifted beauty could not help pausing in her

walk to have a few words with the poetic mason as he hewed in the

churchyard, his head sure to be full of some book or subject, his eye

quick to catch every new light of beauty that fell upon the landscape.

They soon found that they were more to each other than friends, and

thereupon difficulties manifold interfered with their meeting. The

young lady's mother was startled at the idea that her daughter should

bestow her affections on a horn-handed mechanic, even though he had

issued a volume of poems, a volume much praised, not so much bought,

and already looked on almost with contempt by its sternly critical

author. Miller, for his own part, had no wish to rise in the world.

With a philosophy antique and astonishing in these restless times, he

had arrived at the conclusion that the world had nothing to offer

which would make him substantially happier than he was while hewing on

the hill of Cromarty. Had he not the skies and the sea, the wood and

the shore, and had not the whole world of literature and science been

thrown open to him when he learned to read? His wants were perfectly

simple, and exceedingly few, and were supplied to the utmost. He could

be quite happy in a cave with a boulder for table, and a stone for

chair, a book to read, and a pot in which to cook his homely fare; he

might well be less happy, he could not be more, in a gilded

drawing-room.

These pleasing but somewhat effeminate dreams were dissipated by his

love for Miss Fraser, as a pretty little garden on the flanks of Etna

might be torn to pieces by the heavings of the volcano. He would marry

her into the rank of a lady, or he would not marry her, in Scotland at

least, at all. If it proved impossible for him to rise in his native

country, the lovers would seek a nook in the backwoods, and place the

Atlantic between them and the conventional notions and estimates of

British society. But the necessity for this step did not occur. Miller

was offered a situation in a branch office of the Commercial Bank,

which was opened in Cromarty in 1835. He laid down the mallet, not

without satisfaction but assuredly with no exultation, and, after a

brief initiation in the mysteries of banking at Linlithgow, entered on

his duties as bank accountant. Too healthful and honest of nature to

trifle in the discharge of any duties which he undertook, he addressed

himself with vigorous application to the business of the bank, and

found his new situation an admirable post for the study of human

nature. It was in conveying the bank's money between Cromarty and

Tain that he first carried firearms, a practice which he seems to have

almost constantly maintained from this time forward. It was at the

time of his joining the bank that his first prose volume, 'Scenes and

Legends of the North of Scotland,' was published. It contains passages

of exquisite beauty, and has since attained to considerable

popularity; but it was not immediately successful, and added little to

the modest income of its author. His marriage took place in the

beginning of 1837; he was then thirty-five years old, and had been

engaged to Miss Fraser for five years.

Miller was a naturalist from his infancy, in the sense of habitually

observing nature and laying up store of natural facts in his memory;

but it was not until he had passed his thirtieth year, and until his

severe self-censure pronounced him to have failed, first in poetry and

secondly in prose literature, that he conscientiously and with the

whole force of his mind devoted himself to science. His mental changes

and processes were never sudden, and there was a transition period,

during which he hesitated between literature and science; but when his

resolution had once been taken, he cast no look behind. With intense,

absorbing, impassioned energy, he gave himself to the pursuit of

science. His experience in the quarry--of quite inestimable value to

him as a geologist--determined his choice of a scientific province for

special culture. His progress was wonderfully rapid. The geological

nomenclature which he found in books served to classify and formalise

knowledge which he had already acquired, and opened his eyes to the

fact that he was a geologist. But for the interruption of his plans,

by the agitation which issued in the disruption of the Scottish State

Church in 1843, and his being summoned to Edinburgh to undertake the

conduct of the _Witness_ newspaper, he would have published a

treatise, on the geology of the Cromarty district at least a year

earlier than the date at which he became known to the public as a man

of science.

It reminds us how fast and how far the world has travelled in the last

thirty years to note that, in the year 1840, Hugh Miller was an

enthusiast for the State Church of Scotland. There are no enthusiastic

believers in the State Church theory, or what Miller called the

'establishment principle,' now. The most logical and consistent

members of the State Church of England avow that her chance of

vindicating her claim to the name and privilege of a Church depends

upon her ceasing to be a State Church; and the back of the Established

Church of Scotland was broken by the disruption. Sensible men, with

nothing of the revolutionist in their composition, are now generally

of opinion that the days of both our ecclesiastical establishments are

numbered. The opinion, also, would be generally assented to, that it

is when viewed as a contribution to the cause of ecclesiastical

freedom throughout the United Kingdom, that the disruption of the

Scottish Presbyterian Church, in 1843, can be seen to be of historical

importance. Of this Hugh Miller had no idea. He accepted the theory of

a State Church, and he lent his championship to the Majority in the

Scottish Church, when contending against the Court of Session, because

he believed that the compact agreed upon between Church and State in

Scotland, at the time of the union of England and Scotland, had been

infringed. It would occupy too much space to explain fully to English

readers how the State Church of Scotland had become endeared to the

people, and was to them a symbol, not of oppression or of bondage, but

of freedom. Suffice it to say that the Scottish Reformation of the

sixteenth century was thoroughly popular, and essentially

Presbyterian; that, in the seventeenth century, the cause of the

Presbyterian Church was always the cause of civil freedom; and that,

when the Church was finally established, after the expulsion of James

II., she emerged from a long period of persecution, during which she

had been regarded with reverence and affection by the great body of

the Scottish people. Add to this that the lay elders, standing, as

they did, on the same level of authority with the clergy in the Church

courts, prevented the latter from becoming a mere clerical caste. It

was an eminently felicitous circumstance for the Scottish Church, in

the 'ten years' conflict,' that her dispute with the civil authorities

turned on the rights of congregations. Her offence in the eyes of the

Court of Session and the British Parliament, was that she had, in a

manner deemed by them high-handed, asserted the right of congregations

to have no ministers thrust upon them against their will. When we

think of the profound indifference with which State Churchmen, in

England, regard the whole subject of the settlement of ministers--when

we observe the stone-like apathy with which they see dawdling youths

purchase with a bit of money the privilege of consuming a parochial

income and paralysing for, say thirty years, the spiritual life of a

parish--we cannot but contemplate with a mixture of wonder and

admiration the intense excitement which thrilled through Scotland when

the Evangelical majority in the Church Courts stood up to vindicate

the right of the people to be consulted in the choice of their

pastors. It was into the popular side of the controversy that Hugh

Miller threw his force. The right of the Church of Scotland to govern

herself, a right unquestionably conceded to her at the Union, he

distinctly maintained; but his most eloquent and effective pleading

was in defence of the privileges of congregations. He contributed more

perhaps than any other man, to secure for the Church in her struggles

with the Courts, and subsequently for the Free Church, the support of

the people of Scotland. Strange to say, though one of the principal

founders of the Free Church, he had no glimpse of that future of

ecclesiastical freedom of which, as we trust, the Free Church has been

the harbinger. To the last he talked of the 'establishment principle'

and the 'voluntary principle,' and fancied that some ineffable

advantage would be derived by the Church from the State, if only the

State could be induced to make a just league with the Church, and to

stand true to its conditions. This was one of the weakest points in

Hugh Miller's system of thought, and it must be allowed to have been a

very weak one. If the disruption of the Scottish Presbyterian Church

in 1843 proved anything, it proved that, even under the most

favourable circumstances, the State Church principle will not work. If

two ride upon a horse, one must ride behind, and if Scottish

Presbyterians have yet to learn that the State, having established a

Church, will sooner or later thrust it into a position of subservience

and slavery, they may be pronounced unteachable upon that subject.

But it is was our intention to speak of Hugh Miller almost exclusively

as a man of science, and we have lingered too long upon other phases

of his history. His scientific talent was, we think, of a high order.

It consisted mainly in an admirable faculty of observation, keen,

clear, exact, comprehensive. He was habitually, and at all moments, an

observer. Mr. James Robertson, a gentleman who knew him intimately and

walked much with him in 1834, states, in some valuable recollections

of Miller, contributed to Mr. Bayne's biography, that he, Mr. R., soon

remarked how vividly alive he was to the appearances of nature,

darting now at a pebble in the bed of a brook, now, at a plant by the

wayside, never for one moment suspending his inquisition into the

scene of wonders spread around him. Such being his habit of

observation, two conditions only were required in order that he might

become famous as a man of science, first that the district in which he

pursued his researches had not been exhausted by previous explorers;

secondly, that he possessed a literary faculty adequate to the

communication of his knowledge. He was fortunate in both respects. The

Cromarty district afforded extraordinary opportunities of observation

in a department of the geological record until then but partially

known. The Old Red Sandstone system had only begun to attract the

attention of geologists. The Silurian system, below it, had been

successfully explored; the Carboniferous system, above it, had been

penetrated in all directions for its treasures of coal, and geologists

had large acquaintance with its organisms; but the Old Red Sandstone

had been comparatively overlooked. Miller found himself in the

neighbourhood of good sections of the formation, and studied them with

the utmost care and assiduity. His journeyings as a mason had made him

familiar with the rocky framework of the north of Scotland, into which

the Old Red Sandstone largely enters. He was able, therefore, on

claiming recognition as a man of science, to tender a highly important

contribution to the world's knowledge of one of the great geological

systems. His name is imperishably inscribed among the original workers

in the Old Red Sandstone, along with those of Sedgwick, Agassiz, and

Murchison. His specific contribution was connected with the ichthyic

organisms of the system, and no contribution could have been more

important. The Old Red Sandstone system is distinguished,

biologically, as that in which the vertebrate kingdom, in its lowest

or fish division, was first prominently developed; and the most

niggardly estimate of the achievement of Miller, as a geologist, must

recognise that the discoverer of Pterichthys first called the

attention of scientific men to the enormous wealth of the Old Red

Sandstone in fish. If this is so, it will be difficult to refuse the

addition that he determined the character of the formation. There are

fish in the upper beds of the Silurian system, but the characteristic

organisms are molluscan and crustacean; there are traces of reptile

existence in the Old Red, but its characteristic organisms are fish.

Unquestionably, the sudden rise of Miller into eminence and reputation

as a geologist, was due, in some measure, to the exquisite clearness

and picturesqueness of his style. From his boyhood he had made it one

of his chief aims to perfect his literary workmanship. He had striven

to attain skill in writing, as an enthusiastic painter strives to

attain skill in the technical art of realising form and laying on

colour. His descriptions of fossil organisms surprised and delighted

scientific men, while the imaginative boldness and breadth with which

he depicted the landscapes of the remote past fascinated general

readers. After all, it maybe doubted whether the extreme elaboration

and minuteness with which he described individual organisms, such as

the Pterichthys, was not labour lost. A carefully executed wood-cut

conveys a more correct and impressive idea of the creature than any

words which could be devised. At all events, the descriptions of

fossil organisms in the works of Hugh Miller are as exact and vivid as

any in the English language.

We spoke of the sincerity and earnestness of his religion. He had in

fact that quality of the true man, that he could be nothing by halves.

His religion was what genuine religion always is, a fire warming his

whole nature, and mingling with every operation of his mind. He was

thoroughly acquainted with the works of Hume, and had felt their

subtle and searching power. He had skirted, as we said, the howling

solitudes of infidelity, and now having, as he devoutly believed, been

led by a Divine hand to the green pastures and living waters and

healthful, habitable lands of faith, the central ambition of his life,

never asleep in his breast, was to lead others to the refuge which he

had found. He could not read in God's book of nature without thinking

of God, and endeavouring to trace the marks of His finger, and looking

for smooth stones to be put into his sling, and aimed at the foreheads

of the enemies of the faith. He had no sooner mastered the logic of

geology, and formed a conception of the platforms of life which have

been unveiled by the science in the remoteness of the past, than he

began to perceive, or think that he perceived, certain positions

afforded by it, which the defender of revealed religion might take up

with much advantage in carrying on the conflict with infidelity. Of

these, the best known is his scheme for reconciling the Mosaic account

of the creation of the heavens and the earth with the conclusions of

geologic science. This subject is disposed of in the 'Life and

Letters' in a single sentence; we think it deserved, and propose to

devote to it, more space and attention.

Miller frankly avowed that the view which he originally held as to the

scientific interpretation of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis

had been modified. He had believed, with Chalmers and Buckland, that

the six days were natural days of twenty-four hours each; that the

operations performed in them had reference to the world as inhabited

by man; that a 'great chaotic gap' separated the 'latest of the

geologic ages' from the human period; and the Scripture contained no

account whatever of those myriads of ages during which the several

geological formations came into the state in which we now find them.

As his geological knowledge extended, and in particular, when he

engaged in close personal inspection of the Tertiary and Post-tertiary

formations, he perceived that the hypothesis of a chaotic period,

dividing the present from the past, in the history of our planet, was

untenable. 'No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness,' thus he

announces the result of his investigations, 'separated the creation to

which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus,

and hyæna; for familiar animals, such as the red deer, the roe, the

fox, the wild-cat, and the badger, lived throughout the period which

connected their times with our own; and so I have been compelled to

hold that the days of creation were not natural, but prophetic days,

and stretched far back into the bygone eternity.'

It was legitimate for theologians, sixty years ago, to put their trust

in the theory of a chaotic state of the planet immediately before the

commencement of the human period, and to allege that Scripture had

folded up all reference to preceeding geological ages, in the words

'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' The

authority of Cuvier was then supreme in the world of science, and

Cuvier held that 'not much earlier than 5,000 or 6,000 years ago' the

surface of the globe underwent a sudden and subversive catastrophe.

But no theologian who now maintains this hypothesis can place his

theology on a level with the scientific acquirement of the day. Dr.

Kurtz is the only theologian of any standing who is known to us as

still holding the view of Chalmers; and if we were asked how a person

accurately acquainted with geological science might best obtain a

conception of the untenability of the theory of a recent chaos, we

should advise him to read Dr. Kurtz's defence of the hypothesis. The

German divine repeatedly specifies 6,000 years as the period during

which man and the existing order of terrestrial beings have occupied

our planet. 'According to the Scriptures,' he says, 'the present order

of things has existed for nearly 6,000 years.' He has a theory of his

own on the subject of fossils. 'The types buried in the rocks were not

destined to continue perpetually, or else have not attained their

destination.' They were mere transient phenomena. It would be

difficult to put into language a proposition more inconsistent with

geological fact. The species of the Silurian mollusca have changed,

but mollusca of Silurian type abound at this hour. Evidence amounting

almost to absolute demonstration identifies the _globigerina_ of the

Atlantic mud of to-day with the _globigerina_ of the Cretaceous

system; and Sir Charles Lyell calculates that the Cretaceous system

came to an end 80,000,000 years ago. Pronouncing the types of the past

evanescent, Dr. Kurtz pronounces the type of the present permanent.

The creatures called into existence on the six days of Genesis, which

last he holds to have been natural days, 'were intended to continue,

and not to perish, and their families were not to be petrified in

strata, but each individual was to decay in the ordinary manner, so

that their bones have mostly passed away without leaving any trace.'

This is a pure imagination. There is no reason to believe that the

petrifactive agencies are less active at present than they were in

by-gone geological epochs. The essential and irreconcilable

discrepancy, however, between the views of Dr. Kurtz and the

conclusions of geology, consists in his assumption of a universal

deluge, sweeping away all life, and leaving the surface of the world a

_tabula rasa_, immediately before the appearance of man. He speaks of

'a flood, which destroyed and prevented all life, and after the

removal of which the present state of the earth, with its plants,

animals, and man, was immediately restored.' With marvellous

simplicity he declares that 'the only thing' he 'demands,' 'and which

no geological theory _can_ or _will_ deny,' is that 'the globe was

covered with water' before the appearance of man 'and the present

plants and animals.' There is no geologist deserving the name at

present alive who would admit this proposition; and we suppose that a

large majority of living geologists would maintain that the earth has

certainly not been covered with water since the time of those forests

whose remains are preserved for us in Devonian strata. To name one

among many proofs, the state of the fauna of the Atlantic islands,

Madeira and the Desertas, demonstrates that the earth has not been

enveloped by the ocean for a period compared with which Dr. Kurtz's

6,000 years dwindle into insignificance. Geology pronounces as

decisively against the occurrence of a universal chaos upon earth

6,000 years ago as against the accumulation of all the strata of the

earth's crust in six natural days. There is no sense recognisable by

geological science in which the word 'beginning' can be applied to the

condition presented by the surface of the earth at any period nearly

so recent as 6,000 years ago.

According to the theory of Mosaic geology ultimately adopted by Hugh

Miller, the 'beginning' spoken of in the first verse of the Bible

corresponds to that period when the planet, wrapt in primeval fires,

was about to enter upon the series of changes which is inscribed in

the geologic record. The chaos, dark and formless, which preceded the

dawn of organic existence upon earth, was no temporary inundation, no

miraculous catastrophe, but an actual state of things of which the

evidence still exists in the rocks. Strictly speaking, indeed, the

term 'chaos' has no scientific meaning. Science is acquainted with no

period in time, no locality in space, where there has been a general

suspension of law; and it may be worthy of remark that, although

Scripture speaks of the original state of things as without form and

void, there is no hint that it was beyond control of Divine and

natural ordinance. Relatively to man, however, and to those changes in

the structure and organisms of the planet which the geologist

chronicles, the fiery vesture, in which advocates of the Age theory of

reconciliation between Genesis and geology allege the earth to have

been at one time enveloped, constitutes an interruption to all

research, a commencement of all that can be called scientific

discovery. If it could be shown that the first chapter of Genesis

contains an intelligible and accurate account of the changes which

have taken place in the crust of the earth from the time when form

first rose out of formlessness, and light sprang from darkness, to the

time when man began to build his cities and till his fields, no candid

judge would refuse to admit that the problem presented by the chapter

had been satisfactorily solved, and that the chapter itself formed a

sublimely appropriate vestibule to the temple of Revelation.

Let us state Miller's conception of the meaning and scientific purport

of the first chapter of Genesis in his own words:--

'What may be termed,' we quote from the _Testimony of the

Rocks_, 'the three geologic days--the third, fifth, and

sixth--may be held to have extended over those

Carboniferous periods during which the great plants were

created--over those Oolitic and Cretaceous periods during

which the great sea-monsters and birds were created--and

over those Tertiary periods during which the great

terrestrial mammals were created. For the intervening, or

fourth day, we have that wide space represented by the

Permian and Triassic periods, which, less conspicuous in

their floras than the periods that went immediately before,

and less conspicuous in their faunas than the periods that

came immediately after, were marked by the decline and

ultimate extinction of the Palæozoic forms, and the first

partially developed beginnings of the secondary ones. And

for the first and second days there remains the great Azoic

period, during which the immensely developed gneisses,

mica-schists, and primary clay-slates were deposited, and

the two extended periods represented by the Silurian and

Old Red Sandstone system. These, taken together, exhaust

the geological scale, and may be named in their order as,

first, the Azoic day or period; second, the Silurian, or

Old Red Sandstone day, or period; third, the Carboniferous

day, or period; fourth, the Permian or Triassic day, or

period; and sixth, the Tertiary day, or period.'

It is important to observe that Miller here expressly fits into his

scheme the work of the six days. In another passage he remarks that it

is specifically his task, as a geologist, to account for the

operations of the third, fifth, and sixth days, and this circumstance

has occasioned the mistake, which has crept into so respectable a work

as Smith's 'Dictionary of the Bible,' that he did not profess to

explain the creative proceedings of the first, second, and fourth

days. In the passage we have quoted he assigns to each successive day

its distinctive character and work. The entire scheme, then, may be

thrown into a single sentence. A beginning of formlessness and fire,

indefinite in duration; a first and second day, not discriminated by

Miller from each other, during which light, though created, did not

reach, the surface of our planet, but gradually struggled through the

thick enveloping canopy of steam rising from a boiling ocean; a third

day, in which an enormous development of vegetable life took place, a

development due in part to the warm and humid atmosphere, which no

clear sunbeam could as yet penetrate; a fourth day, marked by the

emergence of sun, moon, and stars in unclouded splendour, but by no

striking phenomena of organic life; a fifth day, in which the most

imposing features in the creative procession were sea-monsters and

birds; and a sixth day, in which huge mammals crowded the stage of

existence, and man appeared. Each of these days is, of course,

supposed to have occupied an indefinite number of years.

It is obviously the principle or method of this scheme of

reconciliation between Genesis and geology to look for points in the

Mosaic narrative which correspond with the facts revealed by geology.

The words in the Scriptural account are few; are they so express,

vivid, and characteristic that they epitomise, as in a Divine

telegram, the geological history of millions of years? A consummate

artist looks upon a face and throws a few strokes, quick as

lightning, upon his canvas. The countenance seems to live. Revealings

of character, which we might have required years to trace, flash on us

from the eye, and chronicles of passion are written in a speck of

crimson on the lip. The portrait is only a sketch; weeks or months

might be spent in elaborating its colour, and perfecting its gradation

of light and shade; but not less on this account, does it accurately

correspond with the original, and show the man to those who knew him.

The advocates of the Age theory of Mosaic geology maintain that, few

as are the touches in the pictured history of the world in the first

chapter of Genesis, the geologist can recognise them as unmistakeably

true to the facts of the past. The correspondence alleged to exist has

been illustrated in yet another fashion. Look upon a mountainous

horizon, in the far distance, on a clear day, and you perceive a

delicate film of blue or pearly grey, relieved against the sky. The

outline of that film, faint though it be, is, for every kind of

mountain range, more or less characteristic. The horizon line of the

primaries will be serrated, peaked, and jagged. The horizon line of

the metamorphic hills, though fantastic, will have more of curve and

undulation. The horizon of the tertiaries will be in long sweeps, and

tenderly modulated, far-stretching lines. Those minute jags and points

of the primaries are dizzy precipices and towering peaks. The glacier

is creeping on under that filmy blue; the avalanche is thundering in

that intense silence. Rivers that will channel continents and separate

nation from nation, bound along in foaming cataracts, where you

perceive only that the tender amethyst of the sky has taken a deeper

tinge. That undulating line of the crystalline hills tells of broad,

dreary moors, dark, sullen streams, sparse fields of stunted corn.

That sweeping, melting, waving line of the tertiaries tells of stately

forest and gardened plain, of lordly mansions and bustling villages.

The Mosaic record, as interpreted by the advocates of the Age theory,

gives the _horizon lines_ of successive geological eras. Its

descriptions, they maintain, are correct, viewed as horizon lines.

They convey the largest amount of knowledge concerning the several

periods which could possibly be conveyed under the given conditions.

Such is the method or logic of the Age theory of Mosaic geology; and

it is manifest that, whatever may be its scientific value, it is no

more to be refuted by the mention of geological facts which the Mosaic

record, does not specify, than the accuracy of a map, constructed on

the scale of half an inch to the hundred miles, would be impugned by

proving that it omitted a particular wood, rock, hill, or village.

It is indispensable to the establishment of this theory, that the

geological changes which the earth has undergone, shall admit of being

arranged in certain divisions. The lines of demarcation between these

may be drawn within wide limits of variation; but should it become an

unquestioned truth of geologic science that absolute uniformity of

phenomena has reigned in our world so long as the geologist traces its

history, the Age theory would be untenable. The theory does not

require that the 'solutions of continuity' should be abrupt or

catastrophic. On the contrary, the 'morning' and' evening' of the

Mosaic record suggest gradation; and the pause of night, with its

silence, its slumber, its gathering up of force for new outgoings of

the creative energy, by no means suggests cataclysm or revolution. But

the days or periods, though they may melt into each other with the

tender modulation of broad billows on a calming sea, must possess a

true differentiation, and cannot be accepted by those who believe in

absolute geological uniformitarianism. We are not sure, however, that

any geologists profess this creed, and the views propounded by very

eminent geologists on the nature of the changes which have taken place

on the earth appear to us to satisfy the requirements of the Age

theory, in respect of division and succession. In the sixth edition of

his 'Elements of Geology' Sir Charles Lyell writes thus:--'Geology,

although it cannot prove that other planets are peopled with

appropriate races of living beings, has demonstrated the truth of

conclusions scarcely less wonderful--the existence on our planet of so

many habitable surfaces, or worlds as they have been called, each

distinct in time, and peopled with its peculiar races of aquatic and

terrestrial beings.' He proceeds to state that living nature, with its

inexhaustible variety, displaying 'infinite wisdom and power,' is 'but

the last of a great series of pre-existing creations.' Mr. Darwin, in

the fourth edition of his 'Origin of Species,' makes the weighty

remark that 'scarcely any palæontological discovery is more striking

than the fact, that the forms of life change almost simultaneously

throughout the world.' Qualifying his words by the statement that they

apply chiefly to marine forms of life, and that the simultaneity

referred to, does not necessarily fall within 'the same thousandth or

hundred-thousandth year,' he writes as follows:--

'The fact of the forms of life changing simultaneously, in

the above large sense, at distant parts of the world, has

greatly struck those admirable observers, MM. de Verneuil

and d'Archiac. After referring to the parallelism of the

palæozoic forms of life in various parts of Europe, they

add, "If struck by this strange sequence, we turn our

attention to North America, and there discover a series of

analogous phenomena, it will appear certain that all these

modifications of species, their extinction, and the

introduction of new ones, cannot be owing to mere changes

in marine currents, or other causes more or less local and

temporary, but depend on general laws which govern the

whole animal kingdom." M. Barrande has made forcible

remarks to precisely the same effect. It is indeed quite

futile to look to changes of currents, climate, or physical

conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the

forms of life throughout the world, under the most

different climates.'

Mr. Darwin holds that 'looking to a remotely future epoch,' the later

tertiaries, namely, 'the upper pliocene, the pleistocene and strictly

modern beds of Europe, North and South America, and Australia, from

containing fossil remains, in some degree allied, from not including

those forms which are only found in the older under-lying deposits,

would be correctly ranked as simultaneous, in a geological sense.'

These statements afford, we think, a sufficient basis for the general

scheme of Mosaic geology which we are considering; and it may be

remarked that the latest of the geological epochs of simultaneity, as

defined by Mr. Darwin, would agree indifferently well with the last of

the Mosaic days or periods, as defined by Hugh Miller.

There is yet another proposition which must be established if the Age

theory of Mosaic geology is to be maintained. The scheme depends

essentially on the theory of central heat. We saw that Miller

undertakes to account for each of the six Mosaic days or periods. As a

geologist, indeed, he felt himself to be under a special obligation to

explain the creative operations of the third, fifth, and sixth days,

that is to say, the day on which vegetable life was created and the

successive days on which different orders of vertebrate animals were

introduced into the world; but he gives delineations of the prophetic

vision of the first two days, and he assigns the occurrences of the

fourth day, namely, the appearance of the sun and moon, to the Permian

and Triassic periods. In one word, he accepted the responsibility of

adapting his scheme of reconciliation to all the day-periods of

Genesis, and he was perfectly aware that the hypothesis would require

to be rejected if the theory of central heat were invalidated. His

geological explanation of the first four days depends explicitly upon

the opinion that, at the time when the earth entered upon those

changes which are chronicled by geological science, it was under the

influence of intense heat, and gradually cooling and solidifying. In

the first day thick darkness lay upon the surface of the earth, owing

to the canopy of steam, impermeable by light, under which it lay

shrouded. During the second day the light began to penetrate the

vapoury veil, and dim curtains of clouds raised themselves from the

sea. On the third day the forests, which were heaped up for us into

treasuries of coal, came into existence, and Miller accounts for their

luxuriance by supposing that the heated and humid state of the

atmosphere of the planet, still dependent upon the central fires,

favoured their growth. It was not until the fourth day that the

blanket of the ancient night was rent asunder, that sun, moon, and

stars beamed out, and that a state of the atmosphere and a succession

of summer and winter, day and night, identical with those we now

witness, began. Possibly enough, had Miller found himself ultimately

forced to abandon the theory of central heat, he would have entrenched

himself, as in a second line of defence, in the three specially

geological day-periods. But he never contemplated an abandonment of

the doctrine of central heat. He held that the earth was once a molten

mass, and that the series of changes through which it has passed arose

naturally out of this fact. The crust of granite he believed to have

been enveloped, in the process of cooling, by a heated ocean whose

waters held in solution the ingredients of gneiss, mica-schist,

hornblende-schist, and clay-slate. The planet gradually matured 'from

ages in which its surface was a thin earthquake-shaken crust, subject

to continual sinkings, and to fiery outbursts of the Plutonic matter,

to ages in which it is the very nature of its noblest inhabitant to

calculate on its stability as the surest and most certain of all

things.' In short, he maintained that 'there existed long periods in

the history of the earth, in which there obtained conditions of things

entirely different from any which obtain now--periods during which

life, either animal or vegetable, could not have existed on our

planet; and further, that the sedimentary rocks of this early age may

have derived, even in the forming, a constitution and texture which,

in present circumstances, sedimentary rocks cannot receive.'

Sir Charles Lyell rejects absolutely the theory of central heat as a

mode of accounting for these changes on the terrestrial surface, which

are classified by geologists. He declares that no kind of rocks known

to us can be proved to belong to 'a nascent state of the planet.'

Disclaiming the opinion 'that there never was a beginning to the

present order of things,' he nevertheless holds that geologists have

found 'no decided evidence of a commencement.' Granite, gneiss,

hornblende-schist, and the rest of the crystalline rocks, 'belong not

to an order of things which has passed away; they are not the

monuments of the primeval period, bearing inscribed upon them in

obsolete characters the words and phrases of a dead language; but they

teach us that part of the living language of nature, which we cannot

learn by our daily intercourse with what passes on the habitable

surface.'

From the phenomena of precession and nutation, Mr. Hopkins, reasoning

mathematically, inferred that the minimum present thickness of the

crust of the earth is from 800 to 1,000 miles. This conclusion is the

basis of Sir Charles Lyell's opinion respecting the Plutonic agencies

which take part, or have taken part, in the formation of rocks. He

shows by diagram that, if even 200 miles are allowed for the thickness

of the crust, seas or oceans of lava five miles deep and 5,000 miles

long might be represented by lines which, in relation to the mass of

the earth, would be extremely unimportant. 'The expansion, melting,

solidification, and shrinking of such subterranean seas of lava at

various depths, might,' he contends, 'suffice to cause great movements

or earthquakes at the surface, and even great rents in the earth's

crust several thousand miles long, such as may be implied by the

linearly-arranged cones of the Andes, or mountain-chains like the

Alps.' To invoke the igneous fusion of the whole planet, to account

for phenomena like these is, therefore, he concludes, to have recourse

to a machinery 'utterly disproportionate to the effects which it is

required to explain.'

Sir Charles Lyell derives an argument against the theory of central

heat, from the consideration that it would, in his opinion, involve

the existence of tides in the internal fire-ocean, which tides would

register themselves in the swellings and subsidences of volcanoes.

'May we not ask,' he says, 'whether, in every volcano during an

eruption, the lava which is supposed to communicate with a great

central ocean, would not rise and fall sensibly; or whether, in a

crater like Stromboli, where there is always melted matter in a state

of ebullition, the ebbing and flowing of the liquid would not be

constant?' We venture to remark that this argument does not seem

unanswerable. No one denies that the crust is at present consolidated

to the depth of at least from thirty to eighty miles. The capacity of

known chemical forces to produce intense heat in this region is not

disputed. The eruptions of now active volcanoes might arise,

therefore, from processes going on in a part of the crust separated by

solidified strata from the internal reservoir of liquid fire, and not

accessible to its tides. We might ask also, in turn, whether

observations have been made upon volcanoes in a state of eruption,

exact enough to determine whether they are or are not influenced by

internal tides?

It is affirmed by Mr. David Forbes, in a recent number of _Nature_,

that Professor Palmieri stated, as the result of observations made by

him during the last eruption of Vesuvius, 'that the moon's attraction

occasioned tides in the central zone of molten lava, in quite a

similar manner as it causes them in the ocean.' Mr. Forbes adds that

'a further corroboration of this view is seen in the results of an

examination of the records of some 7,000 earthquake shocks which

occurred during the first half of this century, compiled by Perry, and

which, according to him, demonstrate that earthquakes are much more

frequent in the conjunction and opposition of the moon than at other

times, more so when the moon is near the earth than when it is

distant, and also more frequent in the hour of its passage through the

meridian.' If these statements are correct--and we have no reason to

call them in question--the supposed fact, which Sir Charles presumed

to tell in his favour, has been converted into an ascertained fact

which tells most forcibly against him.

In the latest edition of his 'Principles of Geology,' Sir Charles

Lyell seems, in at least one passage, to assume that this controversy

is at an end.

'It must not be forgotten,' (these are his words) 'that the

geological speculations still in vogue respecting the

original fluidity of the planet, and the gradual

consolidation of its external shell, belong to a period

when theoretical ideas were entertained as to the relative

age of the crystalline foundations of that shell wholly at

variance with the present state of our knowledge. It was

formerly imagined that all granite was of very high

antiquity, and that rocks, such as gneiss, mica-schist, and

clay-slate, were also anterior in date to the existence of

organic beings on a habitable surface. It was, moreover,

supposed that these primitive formations, as they are

called, implied a continual thickening of the crust at the

expense of the original fluid nucleus. These notions have

been universally abandoned. It is now ascertained that the

granites of different regions are by no means all of the

same antiquity, and it is hardly possible to prove any one

of them to be as old as the oldest known fossil organic

remains. It is likewise now admitted, that gneiss and other

crystalline strata are sedimentary deposits which have

undergone metamorphic action, and they can almost all be

demonstrated to be newer than the lately-discovered fossil

called Eozoon Canadense.'

"With all deference to one whom we acknowledge to be among the very

ablest living geologists, we must say that this language strikes us as

more emphatic than the state of the discussion warrants. We do not

undertake absolutely to maintain the theory of central heat as

explaining the formation of the granitic and metamorphic rocks, but we

cannot admit, what Sir Charles seems to imply, that the time has

arrived when investigation and experiment on the subject may be

relinquished, and the tone of dogmatic confidence assumed. The

reasonableness of permitting a certain degree of suspense of judgment

regarding it becomes the more evident when we observe that Sir Charles

is not prepared to maintain against astronomers that the planet was

not originally fluid. 'The astronomer,' he says,

'may find good reasons for ascribing the earth's form to

the original fluidity of the mass in times long antecedent

to the first introduction of living beings into the planet;

but the geologist must be content to regard the earliest

monuments which it is his task to interpret as belonging to

a period when the crust had already acquired great solidity

and thickness, probably as great as it now possesses, and

when volcanic rocks not essentially differing from those

now produced, were formed from time to time, the intensity

of volcanic heat being neither greater nor less than it is

now.'

There can be no doubt that astronomers have been startled into

something like general protest against the rigid uniformitarianism of

Sir Charles Lyell. Differing as they do very widely in their

conceptions of the probable manner in which planets are formed, they

seem to agree that those bodies have their beginning in heat and in

fusion. The phenomena of variable stars, taken in connection with the

revelations of spectrum analysis, demonstrate that the combustion and

the cooling of starry masses are occurrences not unknown in the

economy of the universe. If Sir Charles declines to contest the

astronomical position of the original fluidity of the planet,

considerable plausibility will continue to attach to that geological

doctrine which connects the crystalline rocks with the fluidity in

question. Those rocks, from the most ancient granites to the most

recent clay-slates, occupy a large proportion of the earth's surface.

Their great general antiquity is indisputable. The theory that they

furnish the link between the past and the present of the earth's

crust--that they furnish the point where the lights of geological and

of astronomical science meet--strongly commends itself to the mind.

These observations derive additional force from the circumstance that

Sir Charles Lyell's doctrine of the modern and chemical origin of all

crystalline rocks is dependent upon considerations which must be

allowed to possess not a little of a hypothetical and precarious

character. The phenomena of metamorphism, as arising from heat, from

thermal springs, and so on, are well-known and important; but there is

nothing like adequate evidence that they are capable of giving the

crystalline rocks that structure and aspect under which we behold

them. The chemical substances in the crust which Sir Charles presumes

to be capable of forming seas of molten matter, five miles deep and

5,000 miles long, have never placed before human eyes a lake of fire

three miles across; is there not a trace of arbitrary hypothesis in

supposing that, during hundreds of millions of years, those chemical

agencies have been providing, beneath the surface of the world,

cauldrons of fire to melt the granites of all known ages, from the

Laurentian to the Tertiary, to produce the twistings, undulations,

contortions of the metamorphic strata throughout hundreds of thousands

of cubic miles of rock, and to feed every volcano that ever flamed on

the planet? Not even to that proposition which is avowedly at the

basis of Sir Charles's theory, namely, that the solidified shell of

the earth is at least from 800 to 1,000 miles thick, can absolute

certainty be said to belong. We are willing to admit the distinguished

ability of Mr. Hopkins; but it is a fatal mistake to impute to

solutions of problems in mixed mathematics that character of certainty

which belongs to the results of purely mathematical reasoning. Into

every problem of mixed mathematics one element at least enters which

depends for its correctness upon observation. In many cases this

correctness depends on the perfect accuracy of instruments, and upon

consummate skill in using them. A minute error in the original

observation may produce comprehensive error in the conclusion. It is

still fresh in the public memory that new and more accurate

observation corrected by millions of miles a calculation comparatively

so simple as the distance between the earth and the sun. The problem

by the solution of which Mr. Hopkins determined that the minimum

thickness of the crust is from 800 to 1,000 miles depends for its

reliability on certain obscure phenomena connected with precession and

nutation. Sir Charles Lyell admits that the problem is a 'delicate'

one. Mr. Charles MacLaren remarked, and Miller quotes the remark with

approval, that Mr. Hopkins's inference 'is somewhat like an estimate,

of the distance of the stars deduced from a difference of one or two

seconds in their apparent position, a difference scarcely

distinguishable from errors of observation.' Add to this that opinions

might be quoted from mathematicians of name as decidedly in favour of

the theory that the geological changes which have taken place in the

earth's crust are due to central heat, as the deduction of Mr. Hopkins

is opposed to it. In the ninth edition of his 'Principles,' _i.e._, in

the edition immediately preceding that now current, Sir Charles

informs us that

'Baron Fourier, after making a curious series of

experiments on the cooling of incandescent bodies,

considers it to be proved mathematically, that the actual

distribution of heat in the earth's envelope is precisely

that which would have taken place if the globe had been

formed in a medium of a very high temperature, and had

afterwards been constantly cooled.'

Sir Charles replied to this in the same edition that, if the earth

were a fluid mass, a circulation would exist between centre and

circumference, and solidification of the latter could not commence

until the whole had been reduced to about the temperature of incipient

fusion. We fail to see that this is an answer to Baron Fourier. What

necessity is there for supposing that the solidification of the crust

commenced before the matter of the globe had been reduced throughout

to about the temperature of incipient fusion? The water in a pond must

be reduced to about the temperature of incipient freezing before ice

can form on the surface, but this does not prevent the formation of a

sheet of ice on the top.

In the article in _Nature_, from which we have already quoted, Mr.

David Forbes mentions that M. De Launay, Director of the Observatory

at Paris, 'an authority equally eminent as a mathematician and an

astronomer,' having carefully considered Mr. Hopkins's problem,

decided that its data were incorrect, and that it could shed no light

whatever on the question whether the globe is liquid or solid. There

is some doubt, however, as to the import of M. De Launay's statement.

We may be the more disposed to wonder at the decision with which Sir

Charles Lyell pronounces upon this subject in his latest edition, by

the fact that, since the publication of the previous edition, he has

modified, to a very serious extent, his conception of the evidence on

which the theory which he adopts is based. In the ninth edition of the

'Principles' he laid so much stress on Sir Humphry Davy's hypothesis

of an un-oxidized metallic nucleus of the globe, liable to be

oxidized at any point of its periphery by the percolation of water,

and thus to evolve heat sufficient to melt the adjacent rocks, that

Hugh Miller, in contending against Sir Charles, selected this as an

essential part of the argument. In his tenth edition Sir Charles does

not even mention Sir Humphry Davy's theory. The star under the

influence of which the tenth edition was prepared was that of Mr.

Darwin. No brighter star may be above the geological horizon, and Sir

Charles may have done well to own its influence, but we submit that

opinions which undergo important modification within a few years ought

hardly to be promulgated as marking the limit between the era of

darkness and the era of light in geological discovery.

After all, however, the crucial question is, whether the theory of

central heat has any positive evidence to support it. Here we meet, in

the first place, with the undisputed fact that heat increases as we

descend from the surface of the earth. Sir Charles Lyell admits that

the fact of augmentation is proved. Experiment and observation, no

doubt, have not yet enabled us to determine the ratio in which the

heat increases as we penetrate into the crust; but this does not

neutralise the force of the fact itself. Sir Charles endeavours to

parry its effect by remarking that if we take a certain ratio of

increase, a ratio which seems to be countenanced by experiment, we

shall, 'long before approaching the central nucleus,' arrive at a

degree of heat so great 'that we cannot conceive the external crust to

resist fusion.' It is surely a sufficient reply to this to say that

our conceptions as to the consequences arising from an admitted fact

can neither invalidate its evidence nor annul the obvious inferences

from it. The reader of the 'Principles of Geology,' besides, who has

been told by Sir Charles Lyell that the interposition of a few feet of

scoriæ and pumice enables him to stand without inconvenience on molten

lava, may be permitted to form a high estimate of the power of many

miles of stratified and unstratified rock to resist fusion by the

internal fires. Sooth to say, however, it will be time to consider an

objection grounded on the ratio of the increase in heat from the

surface of the earth downwards, when the ratio in question has been

ascertained. The fact of increase is admitted; the ratio of increase

is an unknown quantity: it is curious logic to impugn the direct

bearing of the former, on the strength of consequences conceived to

arise from the latter.

Hugh Miller believed that the existence of the equatorial ring, in

virtue of which the polar diameter of the earth is shorter than the

equatorial, furnished explicit evidence that the planet once was

molten.

'If our earth,' he wrote, 'was always the stiff, rigid,

unyielding mass that it is now, a huge metallic ball,

bearing, like the rusty ball of a cannon, its crust of

oxide, how comes it that its form so entirely belies its

history? Its form tells that it also, like the cannon-ball,

was once in a viscid state, and that its diurnal motion on

its axis, when in this state of viscidity, elongated it,

through the operation of a well-known law, at the equator,

and flattened it at the poles, and made it altogether the

oblate spheroid which experience demonstrates it to be.'

In other planets, he urged, the same form is due manifestly to the

action of the same law. Venus, Mars, Saturn, oblate spheroids all,

have been similarly 'spun out by their rotatory motion in exactly the

line in which, as in the earth, that motion is greatest.' In these,

however, we can only approximately determine the lengths of the

equatorial and polar diameters; 'in one great planet, Jupiter, we can

ascertain them scarce less exactly than our own earth;' and Jupiter's

equatorial diameter bears exactly that proportion to his polar

diameter which 'the integrity of the law,' as exemplified in the

relation between the equatorial and polar diameters of the earth

demands. 'Here, then,' proceeds Miller, 'is demonstration that the

oblate sphericity of the earth is a consequence of the earth's diurnal

motion on its axis; nor is it possible that it could have received

this form when in a solid state.'

Sir Charles Lyell holds that the excess of the equatorial diameter

over the polar may be accounted for on uniformitarian principles. 'The

statical figure,' he says, 'of the terrestrial spheroid (of which the

longest diameter exceeds the shortest by about twenty-five miles), may

have been the result of gradual and even of existing causes, and not

of a primitive, universal, and simultaneous fluidity.' Miller denies

this possibility; and we confess that the passage in which he assails

the position of Sir Charles Lyell appears to us to have great force.

Let us hear him:--

'The laws of deposition are few, simple, and well known.

The denuding and transporting agencies are floods, tides,

waves, icebergs. The sea has its currents, the land its

rivers; but while some of these flow from the poles towards

the equator, others flow from the equator towards the poles

uninfluenced by the rotatory motion; and the vast depth and

extent of the equatorial seas show that the ratio of

deposition is not greater in them than in the seas of the

temperate regions. We have, indeed, in the Arctic and

Antarctic currents, and the icebergs which they bear,

agents of denudation and transport permanent in the present

state of things, which bring detrital matter from the

higher towards the lower latitudes; but they stop far short

of the tropics; they have no connection with the rotatory

motion; and their influence on the form of the earth must

be infinitely slight; nay, even were the case otherwise,

instead of tending to the formation of an equatorial ring,

they would lead to the production of two rings widely

distant from the equator. And, judging from what appears,

we must hold that the laws of Plutonic intrusion or

upheaval, though more obscure than those of deposition,

operate quite as independently of the earth's rotatory

motion. Were the case otherwise, the mountain systems of

the world, and all the great continents, would be clustered

at the equator; and the great lands and great oceans of our

planet, instead of running, as they do, in so remarkable a

manner, from south to north, would range, like the belts of

Jupiter, from west to east. There is no escape for us from

the inevitable conclusion that our globe received its form,

as an oblate spheroid, at a time when it existed throughout

as a viscid mass.'

Accordingly, though admitting that 'there is a wide segment of truth

embodied in the views of the metamorphists,' Miller declared his

belief on the subject of central heat in these terms: 'I must continue

to hold, with Humboldt and with Hutton, with Playfair and with Hall,

that this solid earth was at one time, from the centre to the

circumference, a mass of molten matter.' Hugh Miller saw the ninth

edition of Sir Charles Lyell's 'Principles,' and seems to have had its

reasonings in view in writing these and other passages; we cannot

persuade ourselves that he would have recalled them if he had lived to

see the tenth edition.

We wish to state in the clearest terms that, though we have stated

some of the evidence which supports the ordinary geological doctrine

of central heat, we do not adduce that evidence as absolutely

conclusive. All we argue for is, that the question be not looked upon

as decided in favour of the uniformitarians. It may be that more

minute and comprehensive observation on the age of the crystalline

rocks and on the phenomena of metamorphism will demonstrate that the

condition of no system of rocks known to us can be traced to the

influence of an originally molten state of the planet. It may be that

what seems at present the unanimous opinion of astronomers, that 'the

whole quantity of Plutonic energy must have been greater in past times

than the present,' is a mistake; it may be, in the last place, that

the primeval fusion of the planet ceased to act upon those parts of

the crust which are accessible to geological observation before those

causes came into operation to which their present state is due. But

we deny that these positions are established. A writer in the

_Edinburgh Review_ declared, so recently as last year, that M.

Durocher, in his 'Essay on Comparative Petrology,' has produced

'absolute proof that the earth was an incandescent molten sphere,

before atmospheric and aqueous agencies had clothed it with the strata

so familiar to our eyes.' Sir Roderick Murchison, who, as a student

not only of books and museums, but of the rock-systems of the world in

their own vast solitudes, is an authority as high as any living man,

holds that 'the crust and outline of the earth are full of evidences

that many of the ruptures and overflows of the strata, as well as

great denudations, could not even in millions of years have been

produced by agencies like those of our own time.' These statements may

be correct or the reverse; but they prove, we submit, that the

controversy respecting central heat is not at an end.

Those who hold that Hugh Miller's views as to the connection between

an originally molten state of the planet and the most ancient rocks

known to us, have been finally disposed of by Sir Charles Lyell, must,

we think, admit that his interpretation of the six days' work can no

longer be maintained. On the other hand, if his conception of the mode

in which the crystalline rocks were formed can be shown to be

substantially correct, we see not how any one can refuse to grant that

those correspondences between the day-periods of Genesis and

successive stages in the geological history of the globe, which he

pointed out, are highly remarkable. Ten thousand omissions of detail

go for nothing, if it can be proved that, although light existed in

space, the condition of the atmosphere of this world prevented the

sun's rays for myriads of ages from reaching the surface; that the

same atmospheric conditions which excluded light from the planet

favoured the development of vegetation in the Carboniferous epoch;

that the day-period during which the sun and moon are stated in

Genesis to have been set to rule the day and the night coincides with

that geological era when light was first poured in clear radiance on

our world; that the times of the Oolite and the Lias exhibited an

enormous development of reptilian and ornithic existence inevitably

suggestive of the creeping things, and fowls, and great sea-monsters

of the fifth day-period; and that the predominance of mammalian life,

of 'the beast of the earth after his kind, the cattle after their

kind,' distinguished alike the latest of the great geological periods

and the sixth day of the Mosaic record. Assuming the correctness of

his fundamental conception of geological progression, Miller might

challenge the geologist--_confining himself to the number of words

used by the Scriptural writers_--to name phenomena, belonging to the

successive geological epochs, more distinctive, impressive, and

spectacular than those mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis.

Admitting that life existed in the planet millions of years before the

time which he assigns to the third day, Miller might ask whether the

darkness, and the slow separation of cloud from wave, were not the

unique and universal phenomena of those primeval ages. Granting that

there was an important flora, as well as a large development of

ichthyic life, in the Devonian epoch, he might ask whether, at any

earlier period, the earth possessed forests comparable with those of

the Carboniferous epoch; and if it were urged that the Carboniferous

flora, consisting as it did in an immense proportion of ferns, cannot

be regarded as corresponding to the 'grass, the herb yielding seed,

and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in

itself,' of the Mosaic record, he might still reply that the _fact_ of

vegetation, apart from botanical distinctions, was then the most

conspicuous among the phenomena of the planet. In like manner, while

granting that life--animal and vegetable, of many forms--existed in

the Oolitic and Liassic ages, he might ask whether the presence in the

planet of at least four unique orders of reptilia, to wit;

Ichthyosauria, Plesiosauria, Pterosauria, Dinosauria, and perhaps, as

Professor Huxley says, 'another or two,' was not the circumstance

which a geologist would select as distinctive, and if so, whether the

coincidence between these and the creeping things and great

sea-monsters of the fifth Mosaic day is not striking. As we formerly

remarked, Miller's geological interpretation of the fifth and

succeeding day is independent of any theory as to the originally

molten state of the planet. On the sixth day-period, both in Genesis

and in the geological history of the world, we have a great

development of mammalian life, and, finally, the appearance of man.

There was a Tertiary flora, but it was not strongly marked off from

other floras; there were Tertiary reptiles, but their place was

subordinate; in respect of their beasts of the field, and in respect

of the presence of man, the Tertiary ages stand alone. The mammoths

and mastodons, the rhinoceri and hippopotami, 'the enormous

dinotherium and colossal megatherium,' elephants whose bones,

preserved in Siberian ice, have furnished 'ivory quarries,'

unexhausted by the working of upwards of a hundred years, tigers as

large again as the largest Asiatic species, distinguish the Tertiary

times from all others known to the geologist. In stating his views,

Miller availed himself of the hypothesis, put forward by Kurtz and

others, that the phenomena of the geological ages passed before the

eyes of Moses by way of panoramic vision. This, we need hardly say, is

a pure hypothesis, favourable to pictorial description, but not

essentially connected with the logic of the question. Perhaps, the

weakest point in Miller's theory--always presuming him to be right as

to the originally molten state of the planet--is the apportionment of

the present time to the seventh Mosaic day and to the Sabbatic rest of

the Creator. Geologists would now, with one voice, refuse to admit

that any essential alteration can be traced in the processes by which

the face of the earth, and the character of its living creatures, are

modified in the present geological epoch, as compared with those of,

at least, the two or three preceding epochs. Man, doubtless, effects

changes in the aspect of the world on a far greater scale than any

other animal. He can reclaim wide regions from the sea, he can arrest

the rains far up in the mountains, and lead them to water his

terraces, he can temper climates, he can people continents with new

animals and plants. It is allowable in Goethe, talking poetically, to

style him 'the little god of earth.' But his entire activity, and its

results, depend not upon a suspension of the laws and processes of

nature--not upon a withdrawal of creative energy--but upon his

capacity, as an observing, reasoning being, to ascertain the processes

of nature, and use them for his own advantage.

The strongest objection in some minds to this scheme of reconciliation

between Genesis and geology will be that it does not harmonise with

the general method of Scripture. Miller was abreast of his time as a

geologist, but from his complete unacquaintance with the original

languages of Scripture and with the history of the canon, he could

form a judgment only at secondhand on fundamental questions in

theology. That the Bible is inspired--that it is pervaded by a Divine

breathing--we have upon apostolic authority. In no part of Scripture,

however, is the nature of this Divine breathing explained to us, or

information given as to what it implies and what it does not imply.

Without question, the inspired writers were neither turned into

machines nor wholly disconnected from the circumstances, the

prevailing scientific ideas, the modes of expression, of their time.

It would seem, therefore, to be in contradiction to the analogy of

Scripture that one of the most ancient books of the Bible should

contain an elaborately correct presentation, by means of its cardinal

facts, of the history of the world for hundreds of millions of years.

Many, therefore, while cherishing the firmest assurance that the Bible

is the religious code of man, the inspired Word which authoritatively

supplements man's natural light of reason and conscience, will believe

that the first chapter of Genesis is a sublime hymn of creation,

ascribing all the glory of it to God, wedding the highest knowledge of

the primitive age in which it was written to awe-struck reverence for

the Almighty Creator, but not containing any scientific account of the

processes or periods of creation. To many it will convey the

impression that its simplicity, childlike though sublime, and its

grouping of natural phenomena, exceedingly noble and comprehensive but

naïve and unsophisticated, are not inspired science, but inspired

religion. It will appear to them that, looking out and up into the

universe, feeling that it infinitely transcended the little might of

man, thrilling with the inspired conviction that God had made it all,

the poet-sage of that ancient time named in succession each

phenomenon, or group of phenomena, which most vividly impressed him,

and said or sang that God had called it into being. The beginning he

threw into the darkness of the unfathomable past. What first arrested

and filled his imagination in the present order of things, was that

marvel of beauty and splendour which bathes the world at noontide, and

lies in delicate silver upon the crags and the green hills at dawn,

that mystery of radiance which is greater than the sun, or moon, or

stars, greater than them and before them; and he uttered the words,

'God said, Let there be light, and there was light.' Then he thought

of the dividing of the land from the sea, and of the separation

between those waters which float and flow and roll in ocean waves and

those waters which glide in filmy veils along the blue expanse, and in

which God gently folds up the treasure of the rain. The sun and the

moon he knew to be those natural ministers which mark off for man day

and night, summer and winter, and he told how God had assigned to them

this office. The creatures that inhabit the world were grouped for

him, as for the young imagination in all ages, into the living things

of the earth, cattle, and creeping things, and wild beasts; the living

things of the sea, fish and mysterious monsters; the living things of

the air, birds; and that vegetable covering which clothes the earth

with flower and forest. All these, he said, owed their being to God.

Man he discerned to be above nature. Shaped by God like other

animals, he alone had the breath, of the Almighty breathed into his

nostrils, and the image of his Maker stamped upon his soul. So be it.

Such recognitions leave the religious character and authority of the

Divine record untouched.