man in all ages has laboured anxiously to unravel. Since Anaxagoras wrote his treatise "De Arenario," the formation of a pebble, the accumulating sands upon the sea-shore, the concrete mass of the mountain, and the brilliants and gems that sparkle on the brow of majesty, have all less or more excited his eager curiosity. The strange forms in the rocks, the life-like impress of plants and animals, and now demonstrated to be such, were long held to have their origin in some occult plastic quality inhering in the rocks themselves, figured and imprinted on their several layers by the invisible agency of natural law. Our ingenious author, among his many remarkable speculations, has likewise tried his hand at world-making; but therein his adventurous spirit has but too obviously soared beyond its power, and his "vision of creation" can only be permitted to take rank among the theories of a Whiston or a Buffon, not as the sober deductions of true science, or the well established conclusions of a Murchison and a Sedgwick. Nor do we regard his chapters on the "Noachian Deluge," learned and minutely descriptive as they are, as either geologically correct or wisely reasoned, and most certainly as not scripturally interpretative of the miraculous phenomenon. Pye Smith, who knew nothing practically of geology, has popularised the notion of a partial or local Flood, and Miller, we regret to say, has lent his authority and name to the untenable doctrine, mainly upon the ground, as he imagines, of the less miracle-power expended in its production. But a miracle he admits it to be; natural means are made use of upon either supposition; and if natural law could accomplish, upon his own admission, neither the partial nor the universal cataclysm of waters, we are surprised that his discerning and acute intellect did not at once perceive that the whole question of agency and extent is as easily solvable upon the greater as upon the lesser hypothesis. How many miracles would be required in balancing, counteracting, protecting, and upholding the various elements embraced in his slow suspension and submergence of the two thousand square miles of earth's massive crust, over the Caspian and Armenian depression of land and sea, imagined as the veritable existing locality of the dire catastrophe And why make a marvel of the Sloth creature traversing a few thousand miles of dry land, and overcoming a few aquatic difficulties, in the long space of one hundred and twenty years travel, when creatures within the narrower limits of "the two thousand miles," had, according to their law and constitution, as many physical obstacles, upon his own or any possible suppositions, to encounter and to master? These are foolish limitations in attempting to reconcile men's minds to the probability or the possibility of an event which has omnipotent power and will in its ordering-creation out of nothing for its analogy-and many cataclysms in the science of geology itself, recorded through the whole ascending series of rocks in every epoch, and cover ing age after age with the spoils of ocean, all the high mountains of the globe. The arguments against a universal deluge, though seemingly The Testimony of the Rocks. strong, are really weak and superficial. The ark, forsooth, could not contain pairs of all existing animals, food, and convenience to maintain them. Their geographical distribution, it is next averred, shows an incapacity for all climates, and how could they be brought together, and made to subsist all in one chamber-residence in the ark? Then, the mass of fresh water poured down from the clouds, or collected by the breaking up of the fountains of the deep, must have rendered the diluvian sea alike unfit for the sustenance of fresh as of salt water creatures, and hence the certain annihilation of the whole finny tribes. Some species of trees, again, are said to be even older than the flood itself, and therefore lived beyond the pale of its destructive influence, as the Taxodium disticha of America, and the Adamsonia digitata of Senegal in Africa; nay, the very Cedars of Lebanon, in the little group which still remains, are shown by their annual increments of growth to be nearly six thousand years old. Finally, Ararat is a precipitous inaccessible mountain, of 18,000 feet in height, and how could animals of every class descend its rocky sides, and reach their several habitats in the distant plains and vallies beneath? But what of all this? Try the other hypothesis-the local deluge-and insuperable physical and physiological difficulties, great, if not greater than any of these, meet you at every step. A proud philosophy, or a sceptical philosophy, may strive to reconcile preternatural appearances with principles of science, or with its own notions of probability; but it will not thereby give one particle of additional evidence to the credibility of the sacred narrative. The whole miracle, as related by Moses, admits but of onesolution, the interposition of divine power, and all attempts at removing, and explaining by removing, the supernatural, by introducing the natural and seemingly probable, savour of the greatest latitudinarianism as placed against the plain declarations of revealed truth. Historical traditions, ethnological deductions, and anatomical laws are all on the side of a universal deluge, and no mere assumptions on the ridiculous plea of an unnecessary waste or expenditure of miraculous agency-where all miracle or any portion of miracle takes it out of the usual course of things-can be allowed to supersede the consistent testimony in support of the Divine Word. But is no account to be taken, in a question of this kind, of the well established principles of geology itself in so many destructions and renewals of organic life, vegetable and animal, at every great epochal division of the science, and these always universal rather than of a local character? Is it not a law, pervading every system of rocks, that the enclosed fossils belong to certain families of plants and animals which have their limits defined, and which limits are never either in the ascending or descending order trespassed, so far at least as species are concerned? The Silurian system commences the era of organic life upon the earth, in the first created things that lived on land or breathed in water; and, embraced within the members of the formation, the organisms are all of a class not to be found in any subsequent or superincumbent series. But the Silurian system is universal, spread over every quarter of the world, and whatever may have been the secondary causes of their extinction, the entire tribes, vegetable and animal, disappear at the close from the face of the globe. "The Old Red Sandstone," the author's special field of investigation, is even more characteristic in its remarkable orders of placoid and ganoid fishes, all utterly obliterated when the next series of rocks commenced, nor is there a portion of the earth which has not its share of the deposit, and which consequently experienced the catastrophe that determined its limitations. Then, what more wonderfully conclusive of a universal formation, and of a universal cause operative in its termination, than the carboniferous or coal series of rocks, whose limestones manifest such an affluent prodigality of animal life on the one hand, and the coal-beds as incalculably large an amount of vegetable life on the other hand? The entire mass, calcareous and combustible, being an aggregation simply of organic matter, and all again utterly extinct and closed over by the next, the New Red Sandstone formation, when scarcely a living thing breathed for ages in any quar ter of the habitable globe. The same of the permian, the liassic, the oolitic, the chalk, and the tertiary systems, one and all enclosing their peculiar organisms, all submerged and destroyed under ocean's floods, and all successively elevated into dry land as the waters retired, and a new order of things commenced. The miracle of the deluge, in its purely theologic aspect, is a fact to be apprehended by FAITH; but it is at least satisfactory, that the analogies of science, instead of running counter to it, thus all run in exactly the same line; and that the OMNIPOTENT WILL, whether in creating or preserving, is alike manifest in all the geologic changes and revolutions of our earliest history, to "assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to man." Nor is it any part, would we say in passing, of the science of geology, properly understood, to inquire into the origin of a material universe, what was the primordial state of matter, or by what initial processes this globe "in the beginning," was wrought into an earthy concrete form? Astronomy has tried various solutions. But whether by the splintering of other worlds, or the evolution of matter from a Saturnian ring, or by the condensation of gaseous star-dust diffused as nebulae through infinite space, no astronomical hypothesis has proved satisfactory. Geology is better, and indeed only legitimately, employed, when she assumes a beginning to her researches upon the tangible crust of the globe. The mystery of creation, and the primal ordering of her laws, are points not within the scope of her true domain; and, while the investigation of secondary causes falls within the province of both, it may be asserted that neither astronomy nor geology are, of themselves, capable of giving us any real account of the origin of the universe, or of any of its parts. Nor does the key to such knowledge any where exist, save in the keeping of Him who knows all and created all, and to whom there is neither beginning nor end. REVELATION can alone disclose the presence-chamber of His working; and save in the divine utterance of that voice, "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," there is no ladder to scale the tree of knowledge, and to bring down the secret from the skies. We do not enter upon the many theories and controverted points that have arisen out of, more especially the vast mass of new information, and the rapid progress of discovery among all classes of rocks, within the last quarter of a century. Geology is a science of facts founded upon observation, and nowhere are the materials of the science more abundant and interesting than in our own land “of mountain and of flood." Here, in our highland Grampian range, are some of the oldest rocks of the globe older than the Alps of Switzerland, older than Chimborazzo, and the Andes in America,— older than the Himalayas, and the lofty table land of Thibet; and there is evidence abundant to prove this, and to demonstrate that this northern portion of our island was raised above the waters and formed a real terra firma, for ages anterior to any of the continental ranges now mentioned. Is this not a subject of investigation for every intelligent mind, and a reproach to obstinate wilful ignorance in every man who has received a liberal education? But with all this, what for research and curious investigation, to be compared with the rich fossiliferous deposits, brought to light within the last decade of our fleeting years, and revealing the repositories of races of creatures that roamed and sported in our waters, when there was as yet no man to till the soil, and no harp to sing his Maker's praise, but which were monuments of His goodness and wisdom through the untold ages of the past? Here are the nereids and the naids who sported in the fresh rivers, or breasted the ocean waves of those distant times, the ostrea, cyclas, and neritina in the same bed; here the Plesiosaurus, with neck of thirty feet in length, watching their gambols and ready to perch upon them as his prey. Here the Pterodactyle, with wings outstretched a hundred feet, and just alighted from his aquatic meal to repose on the Pinetis Eiggensis, the arboreal witness of the period. Here doubtless too, although the bones of this monster fish-reptile have not yet been detected, the crocodilian Ichthyosaurus, whose magnitude of eye was prodigious, and jaws that sometimes exceeded six feet in length, and studded with an apparatus of teeth amounting in some instances to an hundred and twenty; and here, in the greatest abundance, the fragments of Ammonites, Belemnites, and Nautili, side by side with the Cypris and Paludina, and deeply buried in the oolitic promontory of the Ru-Stoir. A strange story of our Hebridean isles in the olden times! where monster dragons have actually warred, and battled, and pursued all the various instincts of their pre-adamic natures; and as in Eigg, so in almost every one of these beautiful islands, the remnants all of once continuous land, broken and swept away by the combined action of oceanic and volcanic agency. The eastern coast-line bears witness to the same won derful affluence of geologic life, massed up and indurated in the rocks, and from Thurso to Peterhead, forming one vast necropolis of the extinct dead, in formation after formation, descending from the chalk to the lowest beds of the Old Red Sandstone. VOL. XXV. Y OUR PARISH. CHAPTER III. Who came forward, and how they came, and how their qualifications were set forth. IN the course of the week following that in which the memorable interview mentioned in our last chapter took place, a meeting of the congregation was held, and although there were certain covert and significant glances among a knot in one corner, while the dominie spoke, and though a lawyer's clerk just out of his teens and apprenticeship hinted at something "hole and corner" on the part of three individuals; and though dame Smith was heard speaking to crony Tibbie Kerr about "some forritsome chiels that should haud by the tause, an no pit their nose intil orra folk's buznis," yet on the whole every thing went smoothly. It was proposed, seconded, and carried unanimously that they should first hear eleven candidates preach, and from these choose three, from which short leet one should be chosen to be the minister of the parish. From what I know now, I am amazed that the number fixed on was so small, but I fancy that eleven seemed such a vast list that each imagined he would get his own favorite included. Be that as it may, the Presbytery in an unguarded moment (it saved the members from supplying the pulpit of Woodlands during the vacancy, and Matthew Henry or somebody like him says, 66 man is not constitutionally a working animal"”) gave permission to the parishioners of Woodlands to hear candidates, for fourteen Sundays. These preliminaries over, there was silence of anxiety in Woodlands. There were wise looks,-weavers became critics, and they and the tailors cut all the paragraphs they could find about ministers out of local papers-paragraphs which told of eloquent evening lectures, " appearances at soirees," "oratory," "fire," "spirit," "pathos," "learning," "riveted attention," "breathless silence," "prophecies of future greatness," "D.D.-ships," "town charges," "professors' chairs," "laurels," "fame," &c. &c., after the edifying manner of local newspapers in such cases. These notices they cut out carefully with scissors, sewed together and hung by the chimney, for purposes of ultimate appeal in the impending crisis. Sound doctrine was at a premium, and one old worthy hearing it mooted that the minister of a neighbouring parish was a "Germeneezer," and fearing that he would come forward, (his own place was superior every way to Woodlands, but that mattered not) walked six miles out and six in, in sleet, and wind, and rain, "to catch him at his tricks, that he might testifie from raal word o' mouth experience, and frae the hearing o' his ain lugs against him, wan voting time had come." Business began. they might back. might back them. Parishioners began to look for candidates whom |
