again from these, with the help of museums and collections, up through the mammaliferous crag of England, to its Red and its Coral crags. And the conclusion at which I have been compelled to arrive is, that for many long ages ere man was ushered into being, not a few of his humbler contemporaries of the fields and woods enjoyed life in their present haunts, and that for thousands of years anterior to even their appearance, many of the existing molluscs lived in our seas. That day during which the present creation came into being, and in which God, when he had made "the beast of the earth after his kind, and the cattle after their kind," at length terminated the work by moulding a creature in His own image, to whom he gave dominion over them all, was not a brief period of a few hours' duration, but extended over mayhap millenniums of centuries. No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness 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 wildcat, 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. After in some degree committing myself to the other side, I have yielded to evidence which I found it impossible to resist; and such in this matter has been my inconsistency,-an inconsistency of which the world has furnished examples in all the sciences, and will, I trust, in its onward progress, continue to furnish many more.

NOTE.

FEw readers of this volume, it is presumed, need to be informed that its lamented author spent a part of the last day of his life in correcting the proofs of its concluding pages. Nothing remained but to give their proper place and name to some of the woodcuts. This has been done by Professor Fleming, to whom Mrs Miller takes the present opportunity of tendering her grateful acknowledgment for this and other offices of kindness so willingly and effectively rendered to the family of his departed friend.

March 1857.

LECTURE FIRST.

THE PALEONTOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS.

PALEONTOLOGY, or the science of ancient organisms, deals, as its subject, with all the plants and animals of all the geologic periods. It bears nearly the same sort of relation to the physical history of the past that biography does to the civil and political history of the past. For just as a complete biographic system would include every name known to the historian, a complete palæontologic system would include every fossil known to the geologist. It enumerates and describes all the organic existences of all the extinct creations, all the existences, too, of the present creation that occur in the fossil or semi-fossil form; and, thus co-extensive in space with the earth's surface,— nay, greatly more than co-extensive with the earth's surface, for in the vast hieroglyphic record which our globe composes, page lies beneath page, and inscription covers over inscription,-co-extensive, too, in time with every period in the terrestrial history since being first began upon our planet,-it presents to the student a theme so vast and multifarious, that it might seem but the result, on his part, of a proper modesty, conscious of the limited range of his powers, and of the brief

A

and fleeting term of his life, were he to despair of being ever able effectually to grapple with it. "But," to borrow from one of the most ingenious of our Scottish metaphysicians, "in this, as in other instances in which nature has given us difficulties with which to cope, she has not left us to be wholly overcome." "If," says Dr Thomas Brown, in his remarks on the classifying principle, "if she has placed us in a labyrinth, she has at the same time furnished us with a clue which may guide us, not, indeed, through all its dark and intricate windings, but through those broad paths which conduct us into day. The single power by which we discover resemblance or relation in general is a sufficient aid to us in the perplexity or confusion of our first attempts at arrangement. It begins by converting thousands, and more than thousands, into one; and, reducing in the same manner the numbers thus formed, it arrives at last at the few distinctive characters of those great comprehensive tribes on which it ceases to operate, because there is nothing left to oppress the memory or the understanding."

But is this all? Can the paleontologist but say that that classifying principle which in every other department of science yields such assistance to the memory is also of use in his, or but urge that it enables him to sort and arrange his facts, and that, by converting one idea into the type and exemplar of many resembling ones, it imparts to him an ability of carrying not inadequate conceptions of the mighty whole in his mind? If this were all, you might well ask, Why obtrude upon us, in connection with your special science, a common semi-metaphysical idea, equally applicable to all the sciences,—in especial, for example, to that botany which is the science of existing plants, and to that zoology which is the science of existing animals? Nay, I reply, but it is not

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all. I refer to this classifying principle because, while it exists in relation to all other sciences as a principle— to use the words of the metaphysician just quotedgiven to us by nature," as a principle of the mind within,-it exists in palæontological science as a principle of nature itself,—as a principle palpably external to the mind. It is a marvellous fact, whose full meaning we can as yet but imperfectly comprehend, that myriads of ages ere there existed a human mind, well nigh the same principles of classification now developed by man's intellect in our better treatises of zoology and botany were developed on this earth by the successive geologic periods; and that the by-past productions of our planet, animal and vegetable, were chronologically arranged in its history, according to the same laws of thought which impart regularity and order to the works of the later naturalists and phytologists.

I need scarce say how slow and interrupted in both provinces the course of arrangement has been, or how often succeeding writers have had to undo what their predecessors had done, only to have their own classifications set aside by their successors in turn. At length, however, when the work appears to be wellnigh completed, a new science has arisen, which presents us with a very wonderful means of testing it. Cowley, in his too eulogistic ode to Hobbes,-smit by the singular ingenuity of the philosophic infidel, and unable to look through his sophisms to the consequences which they involved,-could say, in addressing him, that

only God could know

Whether the fair idea he did show

Agreed entirely with God's own or no,"

and he then not very wisely added,