Part 2

Mr. Miller was born at Cromarty, of humble but respectable parents, whose history would have possessed no inconsiderable interest, even if it had not derived one of a higher kind from the genius and fortunes of their child. By the paternal side he was descended from a race of sea-faring people, whose family burying-ground, if we judge from the past, seems to be the sea. Under its green waves his father sleeps: his grandfather, his two granduncles, one of whom sailed round the world with Anson, lie also there; and the same extensive cemetery contains the relics of several of his more distant relatives. His father was but an infant of scarcely a year old, at the death of our author’s grandfather, and had to commence life as a poor ship-boy; but such was the energy of his mind, that, when little turned of thirty, he had become the master and owner of a fine large sloop, and had built himself a good house, which entitled his son to the franchise on the passing of the Reform Bill. Having unfortunately lost his sloop in a storm, he had to begin the world anew, and he soon became master and owner of another, and would have thriven, had he lived; but the hereditary fate was too strong for him, and when our author was a little boy of five summers, his father’s fine new sloop foundered at sea in a terrible tempest, and he and his crew were never more heard of. Mr. Miller had two sisters younger than himself, both of whom died ere they attained to womanhood. His mother experienced the usual difficulties which a widow has to encounter in the decent education of her family; but she struggled honestly and successfully, and ultimately found her reward in the character and fame of her son. It is from this excellent woman that Mr. Miller has inherited those sentiments and feelings which have given energy to his talents as the defender of revealed truth, and the champion of the Church of his fathers. She was the great granddaughter of a venerable man, still well known to tradition in the north of Scotland as Donald Roy of Nigg,—a sort of northern Peden, who is described in the history of our Church as the single individual who, at the age of eighty, when the presbytery of the district had assembled in the empty church for the purpose of inducting an obnoxious presentee, had the courage to protest against the intrusion, and to declare “that the blood of the people of Nigg would be required at their hands, if they settled a man to the walls of that church.” Tradition has represented him as a seer of visions, and a prophesier of prophecies; but whatever credit may be given to stories of this kind, which have been told also of Knox, Welsh, and Rutherford, this ancient champion of Non-Intrusion was a man of genuine piety, and the savor of his ennobling beliefs and his strict morals has survived in his family for generations. If the child of such parents did not receive the best education which his native town could afford, it was not their fault, nor that of his teacher. The fetters of a gymnasium are not easily worn by the adventurous youth who has sought and found his pleasures among the hills and on the waters. They chafe the young and active limb that has grown vigorous under the blue sky, and never known repose but at midnight. The young philosopher of Cromarty was a member of this restless community; and he had been the hero of adventures and accidents among rocks and woods, which are still remembered in his native town. The parish school was therefore not the scene of his enjoyments; and while he was a truant, and, with reverence be it spoken, a dunce, while under its jurisdiction, he was busy in the fields and on the sea-shore in collecting those stores of knowledge which he was born to dispense among his fellow-men. He escaped, however, from school, with the knowledge of reading, writing, and a little arithmetic, and with the credit of uniting a great memory with a little scholarship. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, Cuvier, he had studied Natural History in the fields and among the mountains ere he had sought for it in books; while the French philosopher had become a learned naturalist before he had even looked upon the world of Nature. This singular contrast is not difficult to explain. With a sickly constitution and a delicate frame, the youthful Cuvier wanted that physical activity which the observation of Nature demands. Our Scottish geologist, on the contrary, in vigorous health, and with an iron frame, rushed to the rocks and the sea-shore in search of the instruction which was not provided for him at school, and which he could find no books to supply.

After receiving this measure of education, Mr. Miller set out in February, 1821, with a heavy heart, as he himself confesses, “to make his first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint:”—

“I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his ‘Twa Dogs’ as one of the most disagreeable of all employments—to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods,—a reader of curious books, when I could get them,—a gleaner of old traditionary stories,—and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil. The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith, rather, (the Bay of Cromarty,) with a little, clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, and which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet.”—Old Red Sandstone, p. 4.

After removing the loose fragments below, picks and wedges and levers were applied in vain by our author and his brother workmen to tear up and remove the huge strata beneath. Blasting by gunpowder became necessary. A mass of the diluvial clay came tumbling down, “bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter.” While admiring the pretty cock goldfinch, and the light-blue and grayish-yellow woodpecker, and moralizing on their fate, the workmen were ordered to lay aside their tools, and thus ended the first day’s labor of our young geologist. The sun was then sinking behind the thick fir wood behind him, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching to the shore. Notwithstanding his blistered hands, and the fatigue which blistered them, he found himself next morning as light of heart as his fellow-laborers, and able to enjoy the magnificent scenery around him, which he thus so beautifully describes:—

“There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky; and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight on the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards; and then, as reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple.”—Old Red Sandstone, pp. 6, 7.

In raising from its bed the large mass of strata which the gunpowder had loosened, on the surface of the solid stone, our young quarrier descried the ridged and furrowed ripple marks which the tide leaves upon every sandy shore, and he wondered what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, and of what element they had been composed. His admiration was equally excited by a circular depression in the sandstone, “broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening.” And before the day closed, a series of large stones had rolled down from the clay, “all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed in the sea or the bed of a river for hundreds of years.” Was the clay which enclosed them created on the rock upon which it lay? No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article!—were the ejaculations of the geologist at his alphabet.

Our author and his companions were soon removed to an easier wrought quarry, and one more pregnant with interest, which had been opened “in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith.” Here the geology of the district exhibited itself in section.

“We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz,—its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende; we find the secondary rock in another, with its bed of sandstone and shale,—its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little known but highly interesting fossils of the Old Red Sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shells and lignites of the lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock,—basalts, ironstones, hypersthenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentences were the patient gatherings of years.”—Old Red Sandstone, pp. 9, 10.

In this rich field of inquiry, our author encountered, almost daily, new objects of wonder and instruction. In one nodular mass of limestone he found the beautiful ammonite, like one of the finely sculptured volutes of an Ionic capital. Within others, fish-scales and bivalve shells; and in the centre of another he detected a piece of decayed wood. Upon quitting the quarry for the building upon which the workmen were to be employed, the workmen received half a holiday, and our young philosopher devoted this valuable interval to search for certain curiously shaped stones, which one of the quarriers told him resembled the heads of boarding-pikes, and which, under the name of thunder-bolts, were held to be a sovereign remedy for cattle that had been bewitched. On the shore two miles off, where he expected these remarkable bodies, he found deposits quite different either from the sandstone cliffs or the primary rocks further to the west. They consisted of “thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substance,” which burned with a bright flame and a bituminous odor. Though only the eighth part of an inch thick, each layer contained thousands of fossils peculiar to the lias,—scallops and gryphites, ammonites, twigs and leaves of plants, cones of pine, pieces of charcoal, and scales of fishes,—the impressions being of a chalky whiteness, contrasting strikingly with their black bituminous lair. Among these fragments of animal and vegetable life, he at last detected his thunder-bolt in the form of a Belemnite, the remains of a kind of cuttle-fish long since extinct.

In the exercise of his profession, which “was a wandering one,” our author advanced steadily, though slowly and surely, in his geological acquirements.

“I remember,” says he, “passing direct on one occasion from the wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at a high angle against the prevailing quartz rock of the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Mid-Lothian, the mountain limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach on the Moray Frith. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granites and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north, I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the Oolite; in the south, I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reeds and tree ferns of the carboniferous period.... In the north, there occurs a vast gap in the scale. The Lias leans unconformably against the Old Red Sandstone; there is no mountain limestone, no coal measures, none of the New Red Marls or Sandstones. There are at least three entire systems omitted. But the upper portion of the scale is well-nigh complete. In one locality we may pass from the Lower to the Upper Lias, in another from the Inferior to the Great Oolite, and onward to the Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag. We may explore in a third locality beds identical in their organisms with the Wealden of Sussex. In a fourth, we find the flints and fossils of the chalk. The lower part of the scale is also well-nigh complete. The Old Red Sandstone is amply developed in Moray, Caithness, and Ross, and the Grauwacke very extensively in Banffshire. But to acquaint one’s self with the three missing formations,—to complete one’s knowledge of the entire scale, by filling up the hiatus,—it is necessary to remove to the south. The geology of the Lothians is the geology of at least two thirds of the gap, and perhaps a little more;—the geology of Arran wants only a few of the upper beds of the New Red Sandstone to fill it entirely.”—Old Red Sandstone, pp. 13-17.

After having spent nearly fifteen years in the profession of a stone-mason, Mr. Miller was promoted to a position more suited to his genius. When a bank was established in his native town of Cromarty, he received the appointment of accountant, and he was thus employed, for five years, in keeping ledgers and discounting bills. When the contest in the Church of Scotland had come to a close, by the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterurder Case, Mr. Miller’s celebrated letter to Lord Brougham attracted the particular attention of the party which was about to leave the Establishment, and he was selected as the most competent person to conduct the Witness newspaper, the principal metropolitan organ of the Free Church. The great success which this journal has met with is owing, doubtless, to the fine articles, political, ecclesiastical, and geological, which Mr. Miller has written for it. In the few leisure hours which so engrossing an occupation has allowed him to enjoy, he has devoted himself to the ardent prosecution of scientific inquiries; and we trust the time is not far distant when the liberality of his country, to which he has done so much honor, will allow him to give his whole time to the prosecution of science.

Geologists of high character had believed that the Old Red Sandstone was defective in organic remains; and it was not till after ten years’ acquaintance with it that Mr. Miller discovered it to be richly fossiliferous. The labors of other ten years were required to assign to its fossils their exact place in the scale.

Among the fossils discovered by our author, the Pterichthys or winged fish is doubtless the most remarkable. He had disinterred it so early as 1831, but it was only in 1838 that he “introduced it to the acquaintance of geologists.” It was not till 1831 that Mr. Miller began to receive assistance in his studies from without. In the appendix to Messrs. Anderson of Inverness’s admirable Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, which “he perused with intense interest,” he found the most important information respecting the geology of the North of Scotland; and during a correspondence with the accomplished authors of that work, many of his views were developed, and his difficulties removed. In 1838, he communicated to Dr. Malcolmson of Madras, then in Paris, a drawing and description of the Pterichthys. His letter was submitted to Agassiz, and subsequently a restored drawing was communicated to the Elgin Scientific Society. The great naturalist, as well as the members of the provincial society, were surprised at the new form of life which Mr. Miller had disclosed, and some of them, no doubt, regarded it with a sceptical eye. “Not many months after, however, a true bona fide Pterichthys was turned up in one of the newly-discovered beds of Nairnshire.” In his last visit to Scotland, Agassiz found six species of the Pterichthys, three of which, and the wings of a fourth, were in Mr. Miller’s collection.

This remarkable animal has less resemblance than any other fossil of the Old Red Sandstone to anything that now exists. When first brought to view by the single blow of a hammer, there appeared on a ground of light-colored limestone the effigy of a creature, fashioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerful looking arms articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the ray, (or skate,) and a long angular tail, equal in length to a third of the entire figure. Its general resemblance is to the letter T,—the upper part of the vertical line being swelled out, and the lower part ending in an angular point, the two horizontal portions being, in the opinion of Agassiz, organs of locomotion. To this remarkable fossil M. Agassiz has given the appropriate name of Pterichthys Milleri. An account of it, accompanied with two fine specimens, was communicated to the Geological Section of the British Association at Glasgow, in September, 1840; and the most ample details, with accurate drawings, were afterwards published, in 1841, in Mr. Miller’s first work, The Old Red Sandstone, which was dedicated to Sir Roderick Murchison, who was born on the Old Red Sandstone of the North, in the same district as Mr. Miller, and whose great acquirements and distinguished labors are known all over the world among scientific men. This admirable work has already passed through three editions. From the originality and accuracy of its descriptions, and the importance of the researches which it contains, it has obtained for its author a high reputation among geologists; while from the elegance and purity of its style, and the force and liveliness of its illustrations, it has received the highest praise from its more general readers.

Although we have been obliged, from the information which it contains of our author’s early studies, to mention the “Old Red Sandstone” as if it had been his first work; yet so early as 1830, after he had made his first fossil discoveries at Cromarty, he composed a paper on the subject, (his first published production,) which appeared as one of the chapters of a small legendary and descriptive work, entitled The Traditional History of Cromarty, which did not appear till 1835. This chapter, entitled “The Antiquary of the World,” possesses a high degree of interest. After describing the scene around him in its pictorial aspect, and under the warm associations, which link it with existing life, he surveys it with the cool eye of an “antiquary of the world,” studying its once buried monuments, and decyphering the alphabet of plants and animals, the hieroglyphics which embosom the history of past times and of successive creations. The gigantic Ben Wevis, with its attendant hills, rose abruptly to the west. The distant peaks of Ben Vaichard appeared in the south, and far to the north were descried the lofty hills of Sutherland, and even the Ord-hill of Caithness. Descending from the towers of nature’s lofty edifice he surveys its ruins, its broken sculptures, and its half-defaced inscriptions, as exhibited in certain Ichthyic remains of the Lower Old Red Sandstone which had then no name, and which were unknown to the most accomplished geologists. Among these he specially notices “a confused bituminous-looking mass that had much the appearance of a toad or frog,” thus shadowing forth in the morning twilight the curious Pterichthys, which he was able afterwards, in better specimens, to exhibit in open day. As we have already referred, with some minuteness, to the fossils which our author had at this time discovered in the great charnel-house of the old world, we shall indulge our readers with a specimen of the noble sentiments which they inspired, and of the beautiful language in which these sentiments are clothed.

“But let us quit this wonderful city of the dead, with all its reclining obelisks, and all its sculptured tumuli, the memorials of a race that exist only in their tombs. And yet, ere we go, it were well, perhaps, to indulge in some of those serious thoughts which we so naturally associate with the solitary burying-ground and the mutilated remains of the departed. Let us once more look around us, and say, whether, of all men, the Geologist does not stand most in need of the Bible, however much he may contemn it in the pride of speculation. We tread on the remains of organized and sentient creatures, which, though more numerous at one period than the whole family of man, have long since ceased to exist; the individuals perished one after one—their remains served only to elevate the floor on which their descendants pursued the various instincts of their nature, and then sunk, like the others, to form a still higher layer of soil; and now that the whole race has passed from the earth, and we see the animals of a different tribe occupying their places, what survives of them but a mass of inert and senseless matter, never again to be animated by the mysterious spirit of vitality—that spirit which, dissipated in the air, or diffused in the ocean, can, like the sweet sounds and pleasant odors of the past, be neither gathered up nor recalled! And O, how dark the analogy which would lead us to anticipate a similar fate for ourselves! As individuals, we are but as yesterday; to-morrow we shall be laid in our graves, and the tread of the coming generation shall be over our heads. Nay, have we not seen a terrible disease sweep away, in a few years, more than eighty millions of the race to which we belong; and can we think of this and say that a time may not come when, like the fossils of these beds our whole species shall be mingled with the soil, and when, though the sun may look down in his strength on our pleasant dwellings and our green fields, there shall be silence in all our borders, and desolation in all our gates, and we shall have no thought of that past which it is now our delight to recall, and no portion in that future which it is now our very nature to anticipate. Surely it is well to believe that a widely different destiny awaits us—that the God who endowed us with those wonderful powers, which enable us to live in every departed era, every coming period, has given us to possess these powers forever; that not only does he number the hairs of our heads, but that his cares are extended to even our very remains; that our very bones, instead of being left, like the exuviæ around us, to form the rocks and clays of a future world, shall, like those in the valley of vision, be again clothed with muscle and sinew, and that our bodies, animated by the warmth and vigor of life, shall again connect our souls to the matter existing around us, and be obedient to every impulse of the will. It is surely no time, when we walk amid the dark cemeteries of a departed world, and see the cold blank shadows of the tombs falling drearily athwart the way—it is surely no time to extinguish the light given us to shine so fully and so cheerfully on our own proper path, merely because its beams do not enlighten the recesses that yawn around us. And O, what more unworthy of reasonable men than to reject so consoling a revelation on no juster quarrel, than when it unveils to us much of what could not otherwise be known, and without the knowledge of which we could not be other than unhappy, it leaves to the invigorating exercises of our own powers whatever, in the wide circle of creation, lies fully within their grasp!”—The Antiquary of the World, pp. 56-58.

The next work published by Mr. Miller was entitled “First Impressions of England and its People,” a popular and interesting volume, which has already gone through two editions, and which may be read with equal interest by the geologist, the philanthropist, and the general reader. It is full of knowledge and of anecdote, and is written in that attractive style which commands the attention even of the most incurious readers.

This delightful work, though only in one volume, is equal to three of the ordinary type, and cannot fail to be perused with high gratification by all classes of readers. It treats of every subject which is presented to the notice of an accomplished traveller while he visits the great cities and romantic localities of merry England. We know of no tour in England written by a native in which so much pleasant reading and substantial instruction are combined; and though we are occasionally stopped in a very delightful locality by a precipice of the Old Red Sandstone, or frightened by a disinterred skeleton, or sobered by the burial-service over Palæozoic graves, we soon recover our equanimity, and again enter upon the sunny path to which our author never fails to restore us.

Mr. Miller’s new work, the “Footprints of the Creator,” of which we publish now another edition, authorized by the writer, is very appropriately dedicated to Sir Philip Grey Egerton, Bart., M. P. for Cheshire—a gentleman who possesses a magnificent collection of fossils, and whose skill and acquirements in this department of geology is known and appreciated both in Europe and America. The work itself is divided into fifteen chapters, in which the author treats of the fossil geology of the Orkneys, as exhibited in the vicinity of Stromness; of the development hypothesis, and its consequences; of the history and structure of that remarkable fish, the Asterolepis; of the fishes of the Upper and Lower Silurian rocks; of the progress of degradation, and its history; of the Lamarckian hypothesis of the origin of plants, and its consequences; of the Marine and Terrestrial floras; and of final causes, and their bearing on geological history. In the course of these chapters Mr. Miller discusses the development hypothesis, or the hypothesis of natural law, as maintained by Lamarck and by the author of the Vestiges of Creation, and has subjected it, in its geological aspect, to the most rigorous examination. Driven by the discoveries of Lord Rosse from the domains of astronomy, where it once seemed to hold a plausible position, it might have lingered with the appearance of life among the ambiguities of the Palæozoic formations; but Mr. Miller has, with an ingenuity and patience worthy of a better subject, stripped it even of its semblance of truth, and restored to the Creator, as Governor of the universe, that power and those functions which he was supposed to have resigned at its birth.

Having imposed upon himself the task of examining in detail the various fossiliferous formations of Scotland, our author extended his inquiries into the mainland of Orkney, and resided for some time in the vicinity of the busy seaport town of Stromness, as a central point from which the structure of the Orkney group of islands could be most advantageously studied. Like that of Caithness, the geology of these islands owes its principal interest to the immense development of the Lower Old Red Sandstone formation, and to the singular abundance of its vertebrate fossils. Though the Orkneys contain only the third part of the Old Red Sandstone, which, but a few years ago, was supposed to be the least productive in fossils of any of the geological formations, yet it furnishes, according to Mr. Miller, more fossil fish than every other geological system in England, Scotland, and Wales, from the Coal Measures to the Chalk, inclusive. It is, in short, “the land of fish,” and “could supply with ichthyolites, by the ton and by the ship-load, the museums of the world.” Its various deposits, with the curious organisms which they inclose, have been upheaved from their original position against a granitic axis, about six miles long and one broad, “forming the great back-bone of the western district of the Island Pomona; and on this granitic axis, fast jambed in between a steep hill and the sea, stands the town of Stromness.”

The mass or pile of strata thus uplifted is described by Mr. Miller as a three-barred pyramid resting on its granite base, exhibiting three broad tiers—red, black, and gray—sculptured with the hieroglyphics in which its history is recorded. The great conglomerate base on which it rests, covering from 10,000 to 15,000 square miles, from the depth of from 100 to 400 feet, consists of rough sand and water-worn pebbles; and above this have been deposited successive strata of mud, equal in height to the highest of our mountains, now containing the remains of millions and tens of millions of fish which had perished in some sudden and mysterious catastrophe.

In the examination of the different beds of the three-barred formation, our author discovered a well-marked bone, like a petrified large roofing nail, in a grayish-colored layer of hard flag, about 100 yards over the granite, and about 160 feet over the upper stratum of the conglomerate. This singular bone, which Mr. Miller has represented in a figure, was probably the oldest vertebrate organism yet discovered in Orkney. It was 5⅞ inches long, 2¼ inches across the head, and ³⁄₁₀ths of an inch thick in the stem, and formed a characteristic feature of the Asterolepis, as yet the most gigantic of the ganoid fishes, and probably one of the first of the Old Red Sandstone. In his former researches, our author had found that all of the many hundred ichthyolites which he had disinterred from the Lower Old Red Sandstone were comparatively of a small size, while those in the Upper Old Red were of great bulk; and hence he had naturally inferred, that vertebrate life had increased towards the close of the system—that, in short, it began with an age of dwarfs, and ended with an age of giants; but he had thus greatly erred, like the supporters of the development system, in founding positive conclusions on merely negative evidence; for here, at the very base of the system, where no dwarfs were to be found, he had discovered one of the most colossal of its giants.

After this most important discovery, Mr. Miller extended his inquiries easterly for several miles along the bare and unwooded Lake of Stennis, about fourteen miles in circumference, and divided into an upper arm lower sheet of water by two long promontories jutting out from each side and nearly meeting in the middle. The sea enters this lake through the openings of a long rustic bridge, and hence the lower division of the lake “is salt in its nether reaches, and brackish in its upper ones; while the higher division is merely brackish in its nether reaches, and fresh enough in its upper ones to be potable.” The fauna and flora of the lake are therefore of a mixed character, the marine and fresh water animals having each their own reaches, though each kind makes certain encroachments on the province of the other.

In the marine and lacustrine floras of the lake, Mr. Miller observed changes still more palpable. At the entrance of the sea, the Fucus nodosus and Fucus vesiculosus flourish in their proper form and magnitude. A little farther on in the lake, the F. nodosus disappears, and the F. vesiculosus, though continuing to exist for mile after mile, grows dwarfish and stunted, and finally disappears, giving place to rushes and other aquatic grasses, till the lacustrine has entirely displaced the marine flora. From these two important facts, the existence of the fragment of Asterolepis in the lower flagstones of the Orkneys, and of the “curiously mixed semi-marine semi-lacustrine vegetation in the Loch of Stennis,” which our author regards as bearing directly on the development hypothesis, he takes occasion to submit that hypothesis to a severe examination, and to point out its consequences—its incompatibility with the great truths of morality and revealed religion. According to Professor Oken, one of the ablest supporters of the development theory, “There are two kinds of generation in the world, the creation proper, and the propagation that is sequent thereon, or the original and secondary generation. Consequently, no organism has been created of larger size than an infusorial point. No organism is, or ever has been created, which is not microscopic. Whatever is large has not been created, but developed. Man has not been created, but developed.” Hence it follows that during the great geological period, when race after race was destroyed, and new forms of life called into being, “nature had been pregnant with the human race,” and that immortal and intellectual Man is but the development of the Brute—itself the development of some monad or mollusc, which has been smitten into life by the action of electricity upon a portion of gelatinous matter.

If the development theory be true, “the early fossils ought to be very small in size,” and “very low in organization.” In the earliest strata we ought to find only “mere embryos and fœtuses; and if we find instead the full-grown and mature, then must we hold that the testimony of geology is not only not in accordance with the theory, but in positive opposition to it.” Having laid this down as the principle by which the question is to be decided, our author proceeds to consider “what are the facts.” The Asterolepis of Stromness seems to be the oldest organism yet discovered in the most ancient geological system of Scotland, in which vertebrate remains occur. It is probably the oldest Cœlacanth that the world has yet produced, for there is no certain trace of this family in the great Silurian system, which lies underneath, and on which, according to our existing knowledge, organic existence first began. “How, then,” asks Mr. Miller, “on the two relevant points—bulk and organization—does it answer to the demands of the development hypothesis? Was it a mere fœtus of the finny tribe, of minute size and imperfect embryonic faculty? Or was it of, at least, the ordinary bulk, and, for its class, of the average organization?”

In order to answer these questions, Mr. Miller proceeds in his third chapter to give the recent history of the Asterolepis; in his fourth, to ascertain the cerebral development of the earlier vertebrata; and in his fifth chapter to describe the structure, bulk, and aspect of the Asterolepis. In the rocks of Russia certain fossil remains had been long ago discovered, of such a singular nature as to have perplexed Lamarck and other naturalists. Their true place among fishes was subsequently ascertained by M. Eichwald, a living naturalist; and Sir Roderick Murchison found that they were Ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone. Agassiz gave them the name of Chelonichthys; but in consequence of very fine specimens having been found in the Old Red Sandstone of Russia, which Professor Asmus of Dorpat sent to the British Museum, and which exhibited star-like markings, he abandoned his name of Chelonichthys, and adopted that of Asterolepis, or star-scale, which Eichwald had proposed. Many points, however, respecting this curious fossil remained to be determined, and it was fortunate for science that Mr. Miller was enabled to accomplish this object by means of a variety of excellent specimens which he received from Mr. Robert Dick, “an intelligent tradesman of Thurso, one of those working men of Scotland, of active curiosity and well developed intellect, that give character and standing to the rest.” Agassiz had inferred, from very imperfect fragments, that the Asterolepis was a strongly-helmed fish of the Cœlacanths, or hollow spine family—that it was probably a flat-headed animal, and that the discovery of a head or of a jaw might prove that the genus Dendrodus did not differ from it. All these conjectures were completely confirmed by Mr. Miller, after a careful examination of the specimens of Mr. Dick.

Before proceeding to describe the structure of the gigantic Asterolepis, Mr. Miller devotes a long and elaborate chapter to the subject of the cerebral development of the earlier vertebrata, in order to ascertain in what manner their true brains were lodged, and to discover the modification which the cranium, as their protecting box, received in subsequent periods. This inquiry, which he has conducted with great skill and ability, is not only highly interesting in itself, but will be found to have a direct bearing on the great question which it is his object to discuss and decide.