classify these rocks, and after four years' labour, he assigned to them (1835) the name of the Silurian System, as occupying the ancient Roman province of Siluria. 'Having first, in the year 1833,' says Sir Roderick, separated these deposits into four formations, and shewn that each is characterised by peculiar organic remains, I next divided them (1834-35) into a lower and upper group, both of which, I hoped, would be found applicable to wide regions of the earth. After eight years of labour in the field and the closet, the proofs of the truth of these views were more fully published in the work entitled The Silurian System, 1839.' A further explanation of this system, embodying later researches, was published by the author in 1854, entitled Siluria, the History of the Oldest Known Rocks containing Organic Remains. [The Relative Value of Gold and Silver.] The fear that gold may be greatly depreciated in value relatively to silver-a fear which may have seized upon the minds of some of my readers-is unwarranted by the data registered in the crust of the earth. Gold is, after all, by far the most restricted-in its native distribution-of the precious metals. Silver and argentiferous lead, on the contrary, expand so largely downwards into the bowels of the rocks, as to lead us to believe that they must yield enormous profits to the skilful miner for ages to come; and the more so in proportion as better machinery and new inventions shall lessen the difficulty of subterranean mining. It may, indeed, well be doubted whether the quantities of gold and silver, procurable from regions unknown to our progenitors, will prove more than sufficient to meet the exigencies of an enormously increased population and our augmenting commerce and luxury. But this is not a theme for a geologist; and I would simply say, that The geologist appeals to the book of nature, where Providence seems to have originally adjusted the relative its leaves have undergone no great alteration. He sees value of these two precious metals, and that their before him an enormous pile or series of early sub-relations, having remained the same for ages, will long aqueous sediment originally composed of mud, sand, or survive all theories. Modern science, instead of contrapebbles, the successive bottoms of a former sea, all of dicting, only confirms the truth of the aphorism of the which have been derived from pre-existing rocks; and patriarch Job, which thus shadowed forth the downward in these lower beds, even where they are little altered, persistence of the one and the superficial distribution of he can detect no remains of former creatures. But the other: 'Surely there is a vein for the silver. lying upon them, and therefore evolved after, other The earth hath dust of gold. strata succeed, in which some few relics of a primeval ocean are discernible, and these again are everywhere succeeded by newer deposits in which many fossils occur. In this way evidences have been fairly obtained, to shew that the sediments which underlie the strata containing the lowest fossil remains constitute, in all countries which have been examined, the natural base or bottom rocks of the deposits termed Silurian. [The Lower Silurian Rocks.] In France, Germany, Spain, and the Mediterranean, in Scandinavia and Russia, the same basis has been found for higher fossiliferous rocks. Many years were spent by Sir Roderick, accompanied part of the time by Professor Sedgwick, in Russia and other countries in geologic explorations; and in 1846 he published The Geology of Russia in Europe and the Ural Mountains, in which he was assisted by E. de Verneuil and Count A. von Keyserling. Sir Roderick is author of about a hundred separate memoirs, presented to scientific societies, and he had the merit of pointing out the important fact that gold must exist in Australia. This was in 1844, after inspecting some specimens of Australian rocks brought to this country by Count Streleczki, and comparing them with those of the auriferous Ural Mountains with which he was personally well acquainted. His observations were printed the same year (1844) in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society. Two years afterwards, at a geological meeting in Penzance, Sir Roderick urged the superabundant Cornish tin-miners to emigrate to the colony of New South Wales, and there obtain gold from the alluvial soil in the same manner as they extracted tin from the gravel of their native country. Again, in the year 1846, when some specimens of Australian gold ore were sent to him, he addressed a letter to Earl Grey, then secretary for the colonies, stating his views as to the existence of rich gold-fields in the colony.* Sir Roderick also predicts (1854) that the present large flow of gold into Europe from those tracts will begin to diminish within a comparatively short period-a result of which we have as yet no indication. Highlander, born at Tarradale, Ross-shire-of which Sir Roderick Murchison is by birth a Scottish his father, Dr Murchison, was proprietor-in 1792. He served from 1807 to 1816 in the army, latterly as captain in the 6th Dragoons. He was knighted in 1846, and the emperor of Russia conferred upon him the Grand Cross of the Order of St Stanislaus, with other marks of distinction. PROFESSOR SEDGWICK. The REV. ADAM SEDGWICK has endeavoured to substantiate a lower and still older section of rocks than the Silurian-a slaty formation, in part fossiliferous, and of enormous thickness. He applies to this the term 'Cambrian.' The system has, however, met with a dubious acceptance, Sir Roderick Murchison contending that the Cambrian rocks are not inferior in position to the lowest stratified rocks of his Silurian region of Shropshire and the adjacent parts of Montgomeryshire, but are merely extensions of the same strata. Mr Sedgwick was born at Dent, Yorkshire, about the year 1787; in 1809 he was admitted to a Fellowship in Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1818 was appointed Woodwardian Professor of Geology. He is author of A Synopsis of the Classification of the British Paleozoic Rocks, &c., two volumes, quarto, and A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 1850, besides numerous contributions to scientific and literary journals. PROFESSOR OWEN-DR CARPENTER DR ELLIOTSON. One of the greatest of modern scientific names, associated also with public services for sanitary reform, is that of MR RICHARD OWEN, well known as the Hunterian Professor in the Royal College of Surgeons, and now superintendent of the department of natural history in the British Museum. In physiology and comparative anatomy, Professor Owen's works and contributions to journals and societies are very numerous. Among them areOdontography, two volumes, 1840; History of British museum. Fossil Mammals and Birds, 1846; British Fossil at present before me-a small edition of the Essays of Reptiles, 1849-51; Lectures on the Comparative Bacon, a good deal worn at the corners by the friction Anatomy of Vertebrate and Invertebrate Animals; of the pocket-for of Bacon I never tired. The conNature of Limbs, 1849; &c. Professor Owen is a dition into which I had brought myself was, I felt, one native of Lancaster, born about 1803; he was of degradation. I had sunk, by my own act, for the appointed Hunterian Professor in 1835, and drew time, to a lower level of intelligence than that on which up elaborate catalogues of the physiological speci- it was my privilege to be placed; and though the state mens and fossil organic remains preserved in the could have been no very favourable one for forming a resolution, I in that hour determined that I should In physiology, DR WILLIAM BENJAMIN CARPEN- never again sacrifice my capacity of intellectual enjoy. TER has also earned distinction. His chief works ment to a drinking usage; and, with God's help, I was are-Principles of General and Comparative Phy-enabled to hold by the determination. I see, in siology, Principles of Human Physiology, Vegetable looking back on this my first year of labour, a dangerPhysiology and Botany, Zoology and Instinct in ous point, at which, in the attempt to escape from the Animals, Popular Cyclopædia of Natural Science, sense of depression and fatigue, the craving appetite of seven volumes, Mechanical Philosophy, On the Micro- the confirmed tippler might have been formed. scope, &c. These works were produced between 1839 and 1854, and most of them have gone through several editions. Mr Morell, in his History of Modern Philosophy, has said that Dr Carpenter's virtuous self-denial and decision of character, that works 'manifest some of the best qualities both of was certain to bear precious fruits. Removing to the thinker and the observer.' The father of the physiologist, DR LANT CARPENTER (1780-1840), was a well-known Unitarian minister, and writer on education and theology. DR JOHN ELLIOTSON, a London physician, in 1840 published Human Physiology, and afterwards attracted attention by lectures on phrenology and mesmerism. He procured the establishment of a mesmeric hospital, and set up a periodical, The Zoist, in support of his physiological opinions. Mr Thackeray dedicates his novel of Pendennis to Dr Elliotson, in acknowledgment of his medical skill, 'great goodness, and kindness,' for which the physician would take no other fee but thanks. * * Miller. He had laid the foundation of a habit of HUGH MILLER. As a popular illustrator of geology, no author approaches HUGH MILLER, the self-taught man of science and genius. He was, as is well known, a native of Cromarty, born October 10, 1802. He was of a race of sea-faring men well to do in the world, who owned coasting-vessels, and built houses in the town of Cromarty. One of them had done a little in the way of bucaneering on the Spanish main. Most of them perished at sea, including Hugh's father, who was lost in a storm in 1807. By the aid of two maternal uncles, Hugh received the common education of a Scottish country-school, and was put apprentice, by his own desire, to a stonemason. His sensations and geological discoveries while toiling in the Cromarty quarries are beautifully told in the opening chapters of his work on the Old Red Sandstone. A life of toil, however, in such a sphere as this has its temptations, and the drinking usages of the masons were at that time carried to some excess. Hugh learned to regard the ardent spirits of the dram-shop as high luxuries; they gave lightness and energy to both body and mind. 'Usquebaugh,' he says, was simply happiness doled out by the glass and sold by the gill.' Soon, however, his better genius prevailed. [The Turning-point in Hugh Miller's Life.] In laying down the foundation-stone of one of the larger houses built this year by Uncle David and his partner, the workmen had a royal founding pint,' and two whole glasses of the whisky came to my share. A full-grown man would not have deemed a gill of usquebaugh an overdose, but it was considerably too much for me; and when the party broke up, and I got home to my books, I found, as I opened the pages of a favourite author, the letters dancing before my eyes, and that I could no longer master the sense. I have the volume Hugh Miller. Edinburgh for employment, he saw more of the habits of the working-men, and had to fight his way among rather noisy and intemperate associates. He found that mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against intemperance or licentiousness, but it did form a not ineffectual protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices, such as theft, and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and dishonesty. The following is another of his experiences: Burns tells us that he often courted the acquaintance of the part of mankind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards,' and that though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had yet found amongst them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest virtues-magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty. I cannot say with the poet that I ever courted the acquaintance of blackguards; but though the labouring-man may select his friends, he cannot choose his work-fellows; and so I have not unfrequently come in contact with blackguards, and have had opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of this class has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices real; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callousness of feeling and meanness of spirit lying concealed beneath. three thousand nine hundred years; and both sums united more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line form! It is but a starting-point from the recent period. Not a single shell seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand years. The ancient deposits of the lias, with their mollusca, belemnites, ammonites, and nautili, had by this time overrun the province of the muses, and a Most men, we believe, will agree with the com- nomenclature very different from poetical diction ment rather than the text, high as Burns's authority had to be studied. Theological controversy also is on questions of life and conduct. No man saw broke in; and as Miller was always stout on the more clearly or judged more rightly than Burns, score of polemics, and withal sufficiently pugnaciwhen his passions were not present as a disturbing ous, he mingled freely in local church disputes, the element; but in this case the poet's use of the term forerunners of a national ecclesiastical struggle, in 'blackguard,' like Dr Johnson's use of the term which he was also to take a prominent part. The scoundrel,' was perhaps comprehensive enough to Reform Bill gave fresh scope for activity, and Miller He was elected include men worthy of a better designation. His was zealous on the popular side. experience was then limited and confined to a few a member of the town-council of Cromarty, and companions. Men of the stamp alluded to are often attended at least one meeting, at which, he says, ready to part with money if it does not directly the only serious piece of business was the councillors interfere with their immediate gratification, and clubbing pennies apiece in order to defray, in the have an impulsive generosity of sentiment. But utter lack of town funds, the expense of a ninepenny 'noble virtues' require prudence, self-control, regard postage. Perhaps Miller's interest in burgh politics for the feelings of others, and steady intellectual was a little cooled at this time by a new influence culture; and these cannot long co-exist with folly that began to gain ground upon him. When workand sensuality. One must overpower the othering in the churchyard, chiseling his In Memoriam, as in the forest the oak and the brushwood rise together, and either the tree or the parasite soon asserts the superiority. Returning to the north, Hugh Miller ventured on the publication of a volume of Poems, Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason, 1829. The pieces occasionally rise above mediocrity, and are always informed with fine feeling; but there is much more real poetry in his prose works-infinitely more originality, fancy, and picturesqueness of language. He next wrote some letters on the Herring Fishing, descriptive of the fisher's life at sea, and they shew his happy, observant faculty, and his fine Addisonian English. He had been a diligent student of the best English authors, and was critically exact and nice in his choice of language. Mr Miller was now too conspicuous to be much longer employed in hewing jambs or lintels, or even cutting inscriptions on tombstones, in which (like Telford the engineer in his early days) he greatly excelled. He carried on his geological studies and researches on the coast-lines of the Moray Firth. [The Antiquity of the Globe.] I found that the caves hollowed by the surf, when the sea had stood from fifteen to five-and-twenty feet above its present level, or, as I should perhaps say, when the land had stood that much lower, were deeper, on the average, by about one-third, than those caves of the present coast-line that are still in the course of being hollowed by the waves. And yet the waves have been breaking against the present coast-line during the whole of the historic period. The ancient wall of Antoninus, which stretched between the Firths of Forth and Clyde, was built at its terminations with reference to the existing levels; and ere Cæsar landed in Britain, St Michael's Mount was connected with the mainland as now, by a narrow neck of beach, laid bare by the ebb, across which, according to Diodorus Siculus, the Cornish miners used to drive at low-water their carts laden with tin. If the sea has stood for two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line-and no geologist would fix his estimate of the term lower-then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one-third deeper than the modern ones, 756 he used to have occasional visitors, and among them also met occasionally at tea-parties, and conducted several accomplished intellectual ladies, whom he through the wild scenes and fossiliferous treasures of the romantic burn of Eathie. Meditations among the tombs led to love among the rocks, and geology itself had no discoveries or deposits hard enough to shut out the new and tender formation. Miller was overpowered, and circumstances ultimately sanctioned his union with the youngest, the fairest, and most accomplished of his lady-visitors. ment in Cromarty, and in 1834 he published Scenes He next became accountant in a banking establishand Legends in the North of Scotland, or the Traditional History of Cromarty-a work remarkable for the variety of its traditional lore, and the elegance of its style. Fifteen years a stone-mason, and about six years a bank-accountant, Miller's next move was into that position for which he was best adapted, and in which he spent the remainder of his life. The ecclesiastical party in Scotland, then known as the 'Non-Intrusionists' supporters of the doctrine that no clergyman should be intruded by the law of patronage into a parish against the wishes of the parishioners-projected a newspaper to advocate their views; all Mr Miller's feelings and predilections ran in the same direction; he had sufficiently evinced his literary talents and his zeal in the cause-especially by two able pamphlets on the subject; and accordingly, in 1840, he entered upon his duties as editor of The Witness, a twice-a-week paper. We well remember his farewell dinner at Cromarty-the complacent smiles of old Uncle Sandy, proud of his nephew-the lively earnestness of the minister, Mr Stewart, varied by inextinguishable peals of laughter, for which he was famousand Hugh Miller's grave speech, brimful of geology and of choice figurative expression-and the cordial affectionate feeling with which the friends of his youth and manhood bade God-speed' to their townsman and historian. Life has few things better than such a meeting even to a spectator, and what must it have been to the prime actor in the little drama? The scene was about to be shifted-new characters introduced, new machinery, new duties, and a wider theatre of action. Opinions, thoughts, and language, gathered and fashioned in obscurity, were now to be submitted to the public glare, and tested by severe standards. But early trials, discipline, and study, had braced and elevated the mind -a mind naturally copious, vigorous, and buoyant; and Hugh Miller had been taught what he now set about teaching others, that 'life itself is a school, and nature always a fresh study, and that the man who keeps his eyes and his mind open, will always find fitting, though it may be hard schoolmasters, to speed him on his life-long education.' During the remaining fifteen years of his life, besides contributing largely to his paper, Mr Miller wrote his work on The Old Red Sandstone, 1841, part of which appeared originally in Chambers's Journal, and part in the Witness; his First Impressions of England and its People, 1847; Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness, 1850; My Schools and Schoolmasters, an autobiography, 1854; and The Testimony of the Rocks, a work completed, but not published till after his death. Two other posthumous works have since appeared-The Cruise of the Betsey, or a Summer Ramble among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides, 1858; and Sketch-Book of Popular Geology, being a Series of Lectures delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, with an introduction by Mrs Miller, giving a résumé of the progress of geological science within the last two years, published in March 1859. The death of Mr Miller took place on the 24th of December 1856. He had overtasked his brain, and for some time suffered from visions and delusions, combined with paroxysms of acute physical pain. In one of those moments of disordered reason, awaking from a hideous dream, he shot himself in the heart, and must instantly have expired-a sad and awful termination to a life of noble exertion and high hopes! Mr Miller's first geological work, the treatise on The Old Red Sandstone, is perhaps the most valuable. On that field he was a discoverer, adding to our knowledge of organic remains, various members of a great family of fishes existing only in a deposit of the highest antiquity. One of these bears now the name of Pterichthys Milleri. He illustrated also the less known floras of Scotland-those of the Old Red Sandstone and the Oolite, giving figured illustrations of the most peculiar. But the great distinguishing merit of Miller is his power of vivid description, which throws a sort of splendour over the fossil remains, and gives life and beauty to the The light again brightens-it is day; and over an geological landscape. His enthusiasm and word- expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. painting were irresistible. There was scarce a There is life in that great sea-invertebrate, mayhap decent cottage in Scotland that had not heard of also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance the Paleozoic, the Secondary, and the Tertiary, and of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the every dominie became a paleontologist. Such popu- slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and larity gave a vast impulse to the study of geology, fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what which none of his more profound contemporaries- most strongly impresses the eye is the change which not even Lyell or Murchison-could ever have has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. accomplished. He was in geology what Carlyle lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous is in history, both possessing the power of genius vision by seething steam, or gray, smoke-like fog, is to vivify the past and stir at once the heart and clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, the imagination. In his Footprints of the Creator, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea Miller combated the development theory, or the has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But doctrine of an infinite series in creation. He held there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere, they lie, that the fossils disprove this doctrine. In his last thick and manifold-an upper sea of great waves, work, The Testimony of the Rocks (1857), he goes at separated from those beneath by the transparent firmagreat length into the question of the antiquity of ment, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses the globe, endeavouring to reconcile it with the by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in Mosaic account of the creation. Astronomers do creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the not attempt any such reconciliation, and the geolo-existence of a transparent atmosphere of a firmament gists can never attain to certainty. Miller once stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters believed with Buckland and Chalmers that the six above from the waters below. But darkness descends days of the Mosaic narrative were simply natural for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and days of twenty-four hours each, but he was the morning have completed the second day. compelled by further study to believe that the days of creation were not natural but prophetic daysunmeasured eras of time stretching far back into the bygone eternity. The revelation to Moses he supposes to have been optical-a series of visions seen in a recess of the Midian desert, and described by the prophet in language fitted to the ideas of his times. The hypothesis of the Mosaic vision is old -as old as the time of Whiston, who propounded it a century and a half since; but in Miller's hands the vision becomes a splendid piece of sacred poetry, a description quite Miltonic in conception, and wanting only the dignity of blank verse to be Miltonic also in execution. We question if any person who peruses this vision of creation will ever again read the narrative of Moses without recalling Hugh Miller's gorgeous colouring and sublime imagination. [The Mosaic Vision of Creation.] Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by Milton of that vision of the future which he represents as conjured up before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A 'great darkness' first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the 'horror;' and as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, Let there be light,' and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter-it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. That man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed, and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific Yet, again, the light rises under a canopy of cloud; | At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, but the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand, against a low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely spread country. For at the Divine command the land has arisen from the deep-not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees-of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic club-mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky overhead; as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on, and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full-orbed in the east-to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens-and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea. Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pinewoods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its monsters: great tanninim tempest the deep, as they heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a 'seething pot or caldron.' Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends-the support and preservation of the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young. Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the field graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature -the lion, the leopard, and the bear-harbour in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. 758 The subject of the Noachian deluge is discussed at length, Miller holding with Stillingfleet, Poole, and modern authorities, that the deluge was partial as to the earth, but universal as to the human race. There was no novelty in this portion of his argument, and he sometimes misconstrues the opinions of those he opposes. His earnestness and fertility of illustration enchain the reader's attention, but a reperusal only the more convinces us that Mr Miller's great power lay in descriptionnot in grappling with the difficulties of speculative philosophy. We give a few more specimens of his exquisite composition. [The Fossil Pine-tree.] But let us trace the history of a single pine-tree of the Oolite, as indicated by its petrified remains. This gnarled and twisted trunk once anchored its roots amid the crannies of a precipice of dark-gray sandstone, that rose over some nameless stream of the Oolite, in what is now the north of Scotland. The rock, which, notwithstanding its dingy colour, was a deposit of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, formed a member of the fish-beds of that system-beds that were charged then, as now, with numerous fossils, as strange and obsolete in the creation of the Oolite as in the creation which at present exists. It was a firm, indestructible stone, covered by a thin, barren soil; and the twisted rootlets of the pine, rejected and thrown backwards from its more solid planes, had to penetrate into its narrow fissures for a straitened and meagre subsistence. The tree grew but slowly in considerably more than half a century it had attained to a diameter of little more than ten inches a foot over the soil; and its bent and twisted form gave evidence of the life of hardship to which it was exposed. It was, in truth, a picturesque rag of a tree, that for the first few feet twisted itself round like an overborne wrestler struggling to escape from under his enemy, and then struck out at an abrupt angle, and stretched itself like a bent arm over the stream. It must have resembled, on its bald eminence, that pine-tree of a later time described by Scott, that high above ash and oak' Cast anchor in the rifted rock, The seasons passed over it: every opening spring gave |