tice of the treasures they contain;—let us examine their Zoology. Prior to the exertions of Mr. Miller, the old red sandstone was considered a poor field for the palaeontologist: one author in particular has asserted that " the old red sandstone has hitherto been considered as remarkably barren in fossils;"—let us hear Mr. Miller's opinion in reply.
"My first statement regarding it must be much the reverse of the borrowed one with which this chapter begins. The fossils are remarkably numerous, and in a state of high preservation. I have a hundred solid proofs by which to establish the truth of the assertion, within less than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; and certainly a stranger assemblage of forms have rarely been grouped together;—creatures whose very type is lost,—fantastic and uncouth, and which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even their class;—boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder;—fish plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armour of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin;—other fish, less equivocal in their form, but with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales;—creatures bristling over with thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned,—the tail, in every instance among the less equivocal shapes, formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral bone, but chiefly on the lower side,—the bone sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity,—of a period whose " fashions have passed away." The figures on a Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature, than the fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone."—p. 57.
From this we pass on to the Lamarckian hypothesis of progressive development. Mr. Miller's arguments on this subject are full of wit and point, yet, except as affording him an opportunity of exhibiting his powers, they must be considered as rather amusing than instructive, for in this age of enquiry there are no Lamarckians: the hypothesis is a non-entity,—a spirit known only to those by whom it is conjured up for the express purpose of being submitted to a formal exorcism: each author who mentions it is himself its creator: like the Pope or Guy Fawkes of the 5th of November, it is a being of straw invested with imaginary terrors for the purpose of enhancing the pleasure and the merit of its total annihilation. However, Mr. Miller shall speak for himself.
