Volume 54 — THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. JULY, 1871. (continued 3)

The intellectual intuition of the infinite, which we have endeavoured to vindicate, so far attests this correspondence; but the inspired utterance of the Poet in reference to the soul of nature, no less bears it witness. The identity or affinity of the force within him and the forces without, is felt by the poet when the speculative thinker perceives it not. He cannot analyse into its constituent elements the mystic meaning of the universe which is flashed into his soul in moments of glowing inspiration, as the chemist analyses his earths in a crucible. But he is the

And he may be able to help the merely scientific explorer out of that abyss of mystery in which he is speculatively lost, and to save him from erecting an altar to 'the unknown God.' While his soul, in 'a wise passiveness,' lies open to the visitations of the supernatural, he sees a vision, and he hears a voice, of which he can give no scientific explanation, but which announces to him the 'open secret.'

Perhaps the finest description of the characteristics of the soul's intuitions is that given by Lowell, 'the prevailing poet' of America. He writes—

The poet may thus throw the plank for us where the psychologist or metaphysician fails. He 'sees into the life of things.' His insight, which comes and goes in flashes marvellous but fugitive, which dart across the world and bring back this report of correspondence, illumines every realm of nature. He tells us that it is 'haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind.' He finds the whole temple of nature exquisitely filled with symbols of his own deepest thought. She is a storehouse of imagery expressing the subtlest gradations of his feeling. Wherever he moves he finds that the forms and the forces around him are an interpretation of what he is. They are the symbolic language of his deepest thoughts and highest aspirations, while his innermost life again interprets them. He explains the inner world in terms of the outer, and the outward in terms of the inward. In the grand vocation of the poet, we know of nothing grander than his function to mediate between the baffled ontologist and the man of science. He is a reconciler who presents a common truth which those on either side may recognise, and the recognition of which may draw them together.

This vast and varied region of our complex nature, the æsthetic or poetic, thus comes to the aid of our theology. The great imaginative poets, in their delineations of man and nature, do not idealise; they see: or they see before they idealise. Who will affirm that Wordsworth's 'inward eye'—by the use and cultivation of which he became the greatest of all interpreters of the symbolism of nature—in seeing visions, saw but the ghostly forms of his own imagination, and was not in contact with real existence? Are his 'spiritual presences' as unreal as the fawns and dryads of polytheistic legend? And was not even the early personification of nature a cruder testimony in the same direction,—the belief in these deities of the wood and hill and stream being a dumb homage by the savage mind to a divinity in nature kindred to man? Is the poet, then, a seer,[19] or only the elaborator of fancies?—the mere creator of ideal shapes, or the discerner of real existence? He tells us that nature is a luminous veil, behind which visions are to be seen, and voices heard; that sometimes, in a moment, he has come upon the footprints of the supernatural; and that, in such moments, he is in contact with a reality, which he calls 'the soul of the world.' Why should he call it a soul, if he has no intuition of its analogy and correspondence with his own nature? And what though he speaks continually in the plural, and tells us of the myriad 'presences,' as the scientific explorer speaks of manifold 'forces?' What though he lapses into a semipolytheist interpretation of nature? It is but the sign of a weight of inspiration too vast for one utterance. It indicates that his feeling of the central life has broken up the diversity; that nature's great soul—the Presence—cannot reveal itself at once as all-in-all and all inclusive; within the boundaries of the finite mind. In its very wealth it reveals itself as manifold. But as the poet and the philosopher may combine the manifold in the unity of their own mind, why not also in the unity of the object revealing itself to them?

It is to be observed, however, that the object which the poet's insight attests and reveals, is not phenomenal, but substantial. Hence no question arises as to its origin. It is only that which enters on the theatre of phenomenal existence that demands a further explanation. The entrance and the exit of phenomena are explained, when we refer them to the substance out of which they have emerged, and to which they return. But we do not ask for the origin of substance, any more than for the origin of space, time, or number.

There is still another branch of the theistic evidence from intuition. It is the instinct of worship. Our space admits of but a sentence regarding it. It is seen in the mere uprise of the soul, spontaneously doing homage to a higher than itself; in the sense of dependence, felt by all men who 'know themselves;' in the need which the worshipper feels of approaching One who is higher and holier than himself, and in whom all perfection resides, who is recognisable by him, and is interested in his state; in the workings of the filial instinct seeking its source, and, as said St. Augustine, 'restless till it rests in Thee;' in the suffrage of the heart rising amid the miseries of its lot, and even against the surmises of the intellect, to the 'Rock that is higher than it;' in the soul's aspirations—its thirst for the ideal, while it feels the necessity of an absolute centre or ultimate standard of truth, beauty, and goodness; and even in the passionate longings of the mystic to reach an utterly transcendent good. All these things bear witness to an instinct, working often in the dark, but always seeking its source. They are almost universal, and they are certainly ineradicable. They show how deeply the roots of the theistic faith are planted in the soil of the moral consciousness. We cannot, however, pursue these several lines of proof in detail. They form a fitting link of connection with the more strictly ethical evidence, on which we must add a few paragraphs.

The Kantian argument is more intricate and much less satisfactory than the common evidence from the phenomena of conscience itself. It is founded on the moral law, with its 'categorical imperative,' asserting that certain actions are right and others wrong, in a world in which the right is often defrauded of its legitimate awards, and the wrong is temporarily successful. This, however, says Kant, points to a future; in which the irregularity will be redressed, and therefore to a Supreme Moral Power, able to effect it. The argument is altogether inferential. It is circuitous, its conclusion being in a sense an appendix to the doctrine of immortality; and it has only a secondary connection with the data of the moral law itself. But the phenomena of conscience afford the data of theism directly. We do not raise the question of the nature or the origin of the moral faculty. We assume its existence, as an à priori principle, carrying with it not a contingent but an absolute and unconditional authority. But this moral law within us is the index of another power, a higher personality whence it emanates, and of whose character it is the expression. The law carries in its very heart or centre the evidence of a moral law-giver, his existence not being an inference from, but a postulate of this law. It is given with the direct and antithetic clearness with which the infinite is given as the correlative of the finite; and the ascent from the law to the supreme legislator is not greater than is the ascent from space and time, revealed in limited areas and intervals, to immensity and eternity. The two data are the terms of relation. And thus we do not rise to the divine existence by any 'regressive inference,' as the Kantian argument reaches it; we find God in conscience. Moral analysis reveals Another, within and yet above our own personality: and if we reject that implicate which is folded within the very idea of conscience, it ceases to be authoritative; and, divested of all ethical significance, it sinks to the level of expediency.

Thus the moral part of our nature rests upon the background of another and a divine personality. Let us analyse the notion of duty, the idea of obligation contained in the word 'ought.' If it resolves itself into this, 'it is expedient to act in a certain manner, because, if we do not, we injure the balance of our faculties, promote a schism amongst the several powers, and put the machinery of human nature out of working gear:' then it does not point to one behind it, any more than the phenomenal sequences and designs in nature point in that direction. But if we 'ought simply because we ought,' i.e., because the law which we find within us, but did not produce, controls us, haunts us, and claims supremacy over us, then we find in such a fact the revelation of One from whom the law has emanated. As Fenelon says in reference to the idea of the infinite, breathing the spirit of St. Augustine—

'Where have I obtained this idea, which is so much above me, which infinitely surpasses me, which astonishes me, which makes me disappear in my own eyes, which renders the infinite present to me. It is in me; it is more than myself. It seems to me everything, and myself nothing. I can neither efface, obscure, diminish, nor contradict it. It is in me; I have not put it there, I have found it there: and I have found it there only because it was already there before I sought it. It remains there invariable even if I do not think of it, when I think of something else. I find it wherever I seek it, and it often presents itself when I am not seeking it. It does not depend upon me. I depend upon it.'[20]

Similarly Newman writes of conscience,—

Whence then comes this law which is 'in us, yet not of us, but above us,' which we did not create, and which circumstances do not fashion, though they modify its action? Is it not the moral echo within of a Voice louder and vaster without—a voice which legislates, and in its sanctity commands, issuing imperial edicts for the entire universe of moral agency? In one sense conscience is the viceroy or representative of a higher power; in another it is the voice of one crying in the wilderness of the human spirit, 'Prepare ye the way for the Law.' It ever speaks 'as one having authority,' and yet its central characteristic (as pointed out by a living teacher) is not that the conscience has authority, but that it is 'the consciousness of authority.' It testifies to another: the implanted instinct bearing witness to its Implanter; and through the hints and intimations of this master-faculty thus throned amidst the other powers, we are able to ascend intuitively and directly to God. We are 'constituted to transcend ourselves,' and conscience becomes a ladder by which we mount to the supernatural, as well as the voice inarticulate, yet audible, which speaks to us of God. Thus, to quote the language of one of the Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century (Dr. John Smith)—

'As Plotinus teaches us, "he who reflects upon himself reflects upon his own original," God has so copied forth himself into the whole life and energy of man's soul as that the character of the divinity may be most easily seen and read of all within themselves. And whenever we look upon our souls in a right manner we shall find a Urim and a Thummim there; and though the whole fabric of this visible universe be whispering out the notion of a Deity, yet we cannot understand it without this interpreter within.'

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.