.or instance? But in the stratified or sedimentary rocks we find fossils in the greatest abundance; some of them requiring a lens to be revealed, so minute are these fossil curiosities; others, the remains of great huge beasts and reptiles whose bones and jaws fill us with strange awe and horror. On a closer examination other facts reveal themselves, which, to make our future course intelligible, we must briefly indicate. These water-made, or sedimentary, or stratified rocks are, in the first place, all in a certain order; we can tell which comes first and which is last; they are not always perfect in their series, some may be wanting; but they are always perfect in order. If it be not always 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, &c.—if 3 or 5 have dropped out, the other numbers maintain their relative positions. But what is more remarkable-to the young student of geology it has often a most surprising effect-there is an ascending scale in these fossils as we rise from the lowest to the highest strata of these sedimentary rocks. At the very bottom we find crustaceous, such as trilobites; a little higher, fishes (such as Hugh Miller, in his 'Old Red Sand-Stone,' has described with such vigour and poetry); a little higher we come to the remains of great monstrous giants of air-breathing reptiles, fellows that could stretch across Oxford-street, or take in a dragoon, cap and all, at a bite; these in turn go out of the old world, or seem to go out at least, as we have none of them left now; and then as we rise higher we find huge mammals, to whom a good sized elephant would be little larger than a terrier; these perish, and then comes man, the immortal, intelligent, and responsible creature, priest of a magnificent temple, and lord of a glorious palace.

But there is a third peculiarity: these fossiliferous remains are never mixed. The fossils of the mountain limestone are not found in the seas; nor the fossils of the oolite in the old red sandstone; nor the fossils of the chalk in the tertiary system. So that whenever we go into a district and ascertain its geological character, we know to a certainty the fossils we shall discover before we light on any one of them; besides which, these fossils are not only all arranged in perfect order, but they are all in exquisite preservation; the minute spines on the echinus, or the delicate tidal mark and the shells of the oolite, the beautiful fronds of the fossil fern, or the marks on the stigmaria ficoides, all being as patent to the eye as they would have been when in luxurious life, they had their joy of being in (as we presume) the preAdamite earth. But this is to anticipate. Please, courteous reader, to obliterate that last piece about the pre-Adamite earth.' All these facts Mr. Gosse admits, and then he propounds the knot. Here are the fossils, numerous, different, and most perfect. How did they come into the crust of the earth? 'Shall we accept the antediluvian or the diluvian stratification? The six ages or the six days of creation? The irruptions of internal fire that occurred chiliads before man was made? Those during his protracted paradisaic state, or those at the time of the Flood? The extension of the Mosaic record to universal nature, or its limitation to a region of South Western Asia?' (P. 28.)

So Mr. Gosse states the question; we don't suppose he means it unfairly, but our readers will observe that all the theories that have

been propounded for the reconciliation of geological facts with Scripture statements, are all jumbled together as if of equal credit, although we presume Mr. Gosse knows that no geologist of past or present celebrity has adopted either the antediluvian, or diluvian, or paradisaical' theories. Hugh Miller's 'six ages' is believed in only by a minority, and those not our first-class geologists; while the prevalent conviction, as established by the reasonings and deductions of the most learned and Christian men England has ever possessed, is, that these fossils, vast and innumerable, are all of them pre-Adamite, not placed there by irruptions of internal fire,' (no, Mr. Gosse, that's another bit of dishonesty) but certainly deposited there chiliads of ages' 'before Adam delved and Eve span.'

This theory vexes and perplexes Mr. Gosse.

It is contrary to the plain statement' of Scripture; for Scripture* says in six days God created the heavens and the earth,' and these days, therefore, were not ages, nor could there have been any ages before the six days. Well, then, how did the fossils get there? Listen to our Newton in the worlds below. I venture to suggest in the following pages an element, hitherto overlooked, which disturbs the conclusions of geologists respecting the antiquity of the earth. Their calculations are sound on the recognised premises; but they have not allowed for the Law of Prochronism in Creation.

That law Mr. Gosse develops or enunciates on pages 124 and 347; and we will quote his own expression of the law of Prochronism, lest we should be unintentionally unjust :

'Perhaps it will help to clear my argument if I divide the past developments of organic life, which are necessarily, or at least legitimately, inferrible from present phenomena, into two categories, separated by the violent act of creation. Those unreal developments whose apparent results are seen in the organism at the moment of its creation, I will call prochronic, because time was not an element in them; while those which have subsisted since creation, and which have had actual existence, I will distinguish as diachronic, as occurring during time.' (Pp. 124-5.) That is, the ichthyosaurus, &c., are prochronic, not pre-Adamite; but man is diachronic, because time was an element' in his creation. This is step the first towards cutting, or, as Mr. G. says, 'untying' the geological knot.

There are two chronologies in the earth's history. The macrochronology' and the 'brachy-chronology' (long and short time, or big and little chronology, dear reader), and these shall be expounded by Mr. Gosse himself, for we feel incompetent to the task of putting it into our own words.† We have always felt the attempt to realize the

The

Mr. Gosse is very funny about the ipsissisima verba of Scripture. author of the Protoplast had said "Adam was nine hundred and thirty years old:" on which Mr. Gosse grows angry, and says, Not a word is said of Adam's being nine hundred and thirty years old; the plain statement is as follows:"And all the days that Adamlived were nine hundred and thirty years' !!—Note, p. 23. In a note to p. 353 Mr. Gosse anticipates the effect of his theories. It will at first sight appear ridiculous, and will probably be represented as such; but truth is truth. Undoubtedly truth is truth,' and theory is theory, and goose is goose. Nothing can be plainer.

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idea of creation most painfully difficult. To try and imagine the becoming of something that was not before; the starting into life, lusty and vigorous, of man, or beast, or bird, or stately tree, or arrowy cane, has always been an awful problem. We have rested gladly upon the statement of the ancient record, and there found, not the solution of our difficulties, but the ground of our faith. 'He spake, and it was: He commanded, and it stood fast for ever? In these words we found repose. The conditions, hard and exacting, of our reason might not have been satisfied, but it was a blessed mood of mind' to take on trust the declarations of inspired truth, and to wait for more light hereafter. By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things that do appear.'

Mr. Gosse is anxious to explain Creation. It shall no longer be 'by faith we understand,' but by Gosse we understand' instead of all things being made of things that do not appear,' Paul made a mistake, at least the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews did, for all things were made of things that do appear, and from the Christian point of view we may believe in the eternity of matter. Let us hear the new philosophy. After saying that it is evident that there is no one point in the history of any single creature, which is a legitimate beginning of existence,' he adds, Creation solves the dilemma; creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty power, gives us the commencing point, which we seek in vain in nature. But what is creation? It is the sudden bursting into a circle.* . . . The life history of every organism commenced at some point or other of its circular course. It was created, called into being, in some definite stage. Possibly, various creatures differed in this respect; perhaps some began existence in one stage of development, some in another; but every separate organism had a distinct point at which it began to live. Before that point there was nothing' (except the circle into which Creation made a 'sudden bursting'); this particular organism had till then no existence; its history presents an absolute blank; it was not. The whole organization of the creature thus newly called into existence, looks back to the course of an endless circle in the past.'

This theory Mr. G. expounds by several diagrams, which are simply large circles, in which he gives the endless circle' of a scarlet runner,' a 'fern,' a 'moth,' a 'polype,' and a 'cow.' Almost in despair of conveying Mr. G.'s notions correctly we will give one illustration of his endless circle,' or perpetual development, of which creation solves the dilemma.' Instead of Creation, read 'possibly,' and 'perhaps, two most serviceable words in Mr. G.'s dialect.

The italics are not ours. Where was the circle before creation?

And so on for ever and ever and a day before! And from this and similar diagrams our philosopher adds in large capitals, 'Permit me, therefore, to repeat, as having been proved, these two propositions:

All organic nature moves in a circle.

Creation is a violent irruption into the circle of nature.'

Mr. G. may repeat' this as long as he likes, or can catch ears to listen, but to talk of its having been proved' that creation was rude enough to make a 'violent irruption' into nature's quiet circle, whose circumference wished creation a mighty long way off, is just so much misconception on Mr. G.'s part, arising out of that fully developed self-esteem which is so prominent a characteristic of the religious party with which he is identified.

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Still there are men of science, and believers in revelation also, who want to know what are all these fossils we find in the earth; who ask, as Livingstone asked of the quarryman, 'However did these shells come into these rocks?' and are not satisfied with the Turk-like philosophy' that replies, 'When God made the rocks he made the shells in them.' Besides which, there are not only shells' in the rocks; are there not great huge creatures, ichthyosauri, and pleisiosauri, and enaliosauri (great lizards, dear friends; saurians they are called by the learned, nearly as big as a church), and the megatherium and deinotherium, and lots of other theriods (great beasts, four-footed mammals, that could eat up a forest for dinner, and take a plantation afterwards for dessert); and frogs as big as a dining-table, and oysters, one of which would have been a meal for a large family, and fish (if Hugh Miller is to be believed) most singularly made and weaponprovided, and heaps of other things, we have them here close by us in our cabinet, too numerous to mention;' we say, are there not all these things, and who made them, and what were they made for? We have been accustomed to regard them as the real creatures whom God made in far distant periods of this earth's history, who had their term of life, fulfilled their functions, until in due course they were superseded by other orders of beings.

We find we were mistaken. These creatures never lived at all. Those marvellous eyes of the trilobite never saw the refreshing light. Those saucer-like sockets of the ichthyosaurus never gazed out of the lazy river for an incautious pterodactyle. Those coprolites are not fossil undigested food. This beautiful terebratula never had life; and this marvellously ornamented ammonite never floated on a tropic sea with its companion nautilus. All these were unreal developments, whose apparent results' we witness. The actual commencing point of the world's history was subsequent to the occurrence of such things in the perfect ideal whole, and hence these phenomena would appear precisely as if the facts themselves had been diachronic instead of prochronic, as was really the case.' (P. 353).

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It has given great pain to write this article; personally it has been an affliction to speak so severely of the author of 'Omphalos,' who has long been our guide, philosopher, and friend, in many departments of

natural history; but on public grounds we have felt compelled to say what we think of the pretentiousness and absurdity of the stupid theory of Creation now submitted to the judgment of the nineteenth century. If ever words without wisdom were written they are in this book; and although Mr. Gosse intends it not, his Omphalos' is the most recent phase of that melancholy mood of mind which overlooks a living personal God, as the true King and Lord of all things and all beings, because He is their Creator and Preserver, and which finding itself surrounded by the great difficulties with which the idea of Creation must ever be associated in our feeble minds, resorts to a theory purely arbitrary and perfectly absurd, and accounts for all the grandeur in the colossal remains of pre-Adamite ages, and all the glory of the present modern condition of our planet, by telling us that 'Creation is a violent irruption into a circle.' Mr. Gosse is a good naturalist but a poor philosopher, and this is one of his many books— we trust it will long continue to be the only one-which wise men will laugh at, sceptics rejoice in, and Christians deplore.

W. G. B.

Of

John Milton's History of England.

Of the few books in our library of libraries, the select few of what we are afraid would be considered a rather 'miscellaneous assortment,' there is one known at a glance by its old brown sheep-skin cover and red leather title. It bears the following on its first page:

The HISTORY of BRITAIN, That Part especially now called ENGLAND, From the first Traditional Beginning, Continu'd to the NORMAN CONQUEST. Collected out of the Antientest and Best Authours thereof by JOHN MILTON. The Second Edition.

London, Printed by J. M. for Mark Pardoe and are to be sold at the Black Raven over against Bedford House, in the Strand. 1678.

A priori, a book nearly two hundred years old, and that a book by John Milton, must have had a history. What old Puritan, of whose original dust not a molecule now remains, first bought it? Who was he? What was he? Where did he live? Was he married? And, did he have children? These are vitally important questions in the real —that is, the subjective history of a book, because the book is a different book as these questions are differently answered. Thus, a married man's book is worth more than a single ditto; and a book owned by a man with a family worth a great deal more than the same book would be if the man had no such gods in his household. The same rule, in fact, holds good with regard to what may be called the