REVIEW. (From the Scotsman, April 11.)

Daily Southern Cross, Volume XIV, Issue 1067, 18 September 1857, Page 4

REVIEW. (From the Scotsman, April 11.)

The Testimony of th* Rockh: or, Geology m ttt Bwaringt on the 7wo TfwoUtgiea, Xattirnl and Revdded.' By Hcoit Millck, Author <»f "The Old Red -Sandstone,'' he. The melancholy and impressne circiuvstiinces in which thiswork appears will, to many readers, invest it with dti interest deeper, perhaps, than that derived from the highly important- themes of which it treats. Many who have listened to the author when expounding in his own striking and highly characteristic way, whether in his dearly pu'Zed museum, in the Scientific Society, or, more rarely, to popular audiences— the singular structure of the Old Bed fishes, or the fragments of the extinct vegetation of the Scottish Ooliie— will turn to its pages with eager curiosity at. embodying his latest discoveries and opinions on these subjects. Still wider, probably, will be the number of renders who, caring little for tbo science or the scientific eductions, but regarding Mr. Millar as the most redoubled champion of their Church and its creed, and having an indistinct, undefined dread of jrology. as somehow fraught with peri} to the latter at least, will turn to its pages as the anlidote to this bane -as the safest answer " to the various questions which the old theology of Scotland has been asking ior the last few years of the newest sciences." There will also, we may well believe, he not a few inter•s(t»d in those higher moral and theological problems discussed in this volume, who will turn to it as containing the last and most matured views of one fully informed in the science, sincere and ardent in his religious convictions, and well able to express his opinions in clear, powerful, and eloquent language. 01 all these classes of readers, the last will probably be the most gratified by the book, since even, though they may dissent from (he conclusions, they will find the arguments by which they ace defended well worthy their notice. Above all, they will note the powerful prevading influence which "the new science'^ has exerted in modifying his opinions not merely < n single points— as the antiquity of the world, the origin of death, and nniversality of the Deluge— but even on the principles of interpreting the Scriptures. But go the hook with ■what purpose they choose, readers will not be disappointed in finding in it nil these leading characteristics -which have wok for the author's former works their well deserved popularity ; they will find the same genuine love of nature -which will not allow him to take up the rudest stone or humblest plant without discovering in them something to admire ; the same genuine poetic temperment shedding Tieauty over the wildest mountain scenes, or adding grandeur even to the seaworn granite precipices of the Sulors, and romance of the narrow ravine of the Eathic Bum, worn, with its barred sepulchre of extinct life ; — the same graphic power of calling up, often by a single epithet or illustration, the life-like picture of some won derous denizen of ancient seas, recalling, as it were, these long vanished forms to resume their place in creation ;— above all, that reverent ad.niwtion of creative wisdom and goodnesswhich spreads a higher lustre over every page of his writings. It is not our purpose to write an elaborate summary or criticism ou this volume, and we shall merely indicate a few of the more Temarkable conclusions to which the author arrived. The work is in the form of lectures, and a considerable portion was actually delivered either in this city or in other places, and some of these have already been published in a detached form. The first and second lectures on the Palseontologic History of Plants and Animals, though dealing only with the everyday facts of geological science, yet often acquire a novelty when irradiated by the genius of the author. Thus, when noticing the bird tracts in the sandstones of America, he paints the followingpicture: — " They aTe fraught with strauge meanings these footpaints of the Connecticut. They tell of a time far removed into the by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads the shores of a nameless lake, to wade into its ■hallows in quest of mail-covered fishes of the ancient type, or extinct molluscs ; while reptiles equally gigantic, and of still stranger propoitions, haunted the neighbouring swamps and savannahs ; and when the same sun that shone on the tall moving forms beside the waters, and threw long shadows across the red sands, lightedup the glades of deep forests, all of whose fantastic productions — tree, bush, and herb— have, even in their very species, long since passed away. And of this scene of things only these footprints remain/ With the third lecture, "On the two Records, Mosaic and Geological, 1 ' we reach the leading theme ol the work — the great question for which so many solutions have been proposed— how is the apparent statement of Genesis, that the world and all it contains were formed some six or eight thousand years ago, to be reconciled ■with the facts of geology, which indicate an antiquity of the earth of which even millions of years is scarce an adequate exponent ? In answering this question he s arts with the principle, that " that philology cannot be sound which would coi: mit the Scriptures to a science that cannot be true." Referring to the '"doctors of who deemed it unscriptural to hold with Columbus that the woild is round," and to "Turrettine, who maintained it as the docirine of the Bible, that it -was the earth which mo vis in the heavens and the sun which stands still," he says: — "The mere geographer or astronomer might have been •wholly unable to iiscuss with Turrettine or the Doctors the niceties of Ohaldaic punctuation, or the various meanings of the Hebrew verbs. But this much, not■withstunding, he would be perfectly qualified to say — However great your skill as linguists, your reading of v hat you term the Scriptural geography or Scriptural astronomy must of necessity be a false reading, seeing that it commits Scripture to what, in my character as a geographer or astronomer, I know to be a monstrously false geography or astronomy." Proceeding then to read the record of creation, "in the light of scientific discovery," he finds that it is not a literal history in the ordinary acceptation of the term, hut "a prophetic drama," a description of a series of -visions in which the great leading incidents of creation vrre revealed to the enraptured sense of the ancient piophet, "as the successive scenes of a great air-drawn panorama," The six days of Moses are no longer literal days of twenty-four hours, but periods of vast extent, each embracing one of the gTeat geologic peiiods in the history of the globe. Assuming this theory of interpretation , Ke sketches a series of pictures of each day's work, too long for insertion as a whole, and of which we cannot ruar the beauty and effect by any attempt at an abridgment. Only as a specimen we may quote from the first or azoic day the following

VISION OF CHAOS. "Let us suppose that during the earlier part of this period of excessive heat the waters of the ocean had stood at the boiling point even at the surface, and much higher in the profounder depths ; and further, that the half-molten crust of the earth, stretched out over a molten abyss, was so thin that it could notsupport, save for a short time, after some convulsion, even a small island above the sea level. What in such circumstances ■would be the tsppct of the scene, optically exhibited from some point in space elevated a few hundre»l yards o w the «ea ? It would be simply a blank, in which the intensest glow of fire would fail to be seen at a few yards distsnce.jAn inconsiderable escape of steam from the safety-valve oi a railway forms so thick a screen that, as it lingers for a moment in the passing opposite the carriage windows, the passengers fail to discern through it the landscape beyond. A continuous stratum ot steam then, that attained to the height of even our present atmosphere, would wrap up the earth in a darkness gross and palpable as that of Egypt of old— a darkness through which even a single ray of light would fiil to penetrate. And beneath this thick canopy the unseen d*ep would literally 'boil as a pot,' wildly tempested from below , while from time to time more deeply seated convulsion would upheave sudden to the surface vast tracts of semi molten rock, soon again to disappear, and from which waves of balk enormous would roll outwards to meet in wild conflict with the giant waves of other convulsions, or return to hiss and sputter •gainst the intensely heated and fast foundering mass, •whose violent upheaval had first elevated and sent them •broad." Passing over the lectures on geology in its bearing! on the two theologiit, and the outline' of "the possible poem" that might be written on Satan contemplating the progress ot creation, we come to those on "the Noachian Deluge." In these the theory that it was partial and not unhersal, affecting merely the great Asiatic depression round the Aral and Caspian, not the ■whole surface of the earth, 1* supported by many arguments refuting the evidence brought by Dr. Kitto and others for the opposite view, and showing the absurdity of supposing all the animals to have been shut up in the Ark. , Some of the illustrations are highly characteristic. Thus, supposing South America joined to the Asiatic coast*, he says "it is just possible that, during the Inmdred and twenty years in which the Ark wa6 building, a pair of sloths might have crept by inches •cross this continuous tract" -but the connection once broken, "their voyage homewards could not be other than miraculous '• The lecture on the " the Discoverable and Revealed" contains some highly judicious remarks on the danger ot mixing up science with revel»t>on. and seeking in the pages of Scripture for that instruction in natural factK which man has been left to attain by his own unaided fexertions. The exposure of the " Geology of the AntiGeologisti" might perhaps haee been spared, not that the refutation is incomplete, but that the game killed is 'not worth the powder, and the dullness of hid opponents has in tome measure infected the author To the sci'entffic reader the two concluding lectures "on the Less ULnovro. Fosiil Floras of Scotland" will prove the most interesting in the volume. The author is now again in his own peculiar field, at home in the old grey timeworn, burgh of Cromarty, looking out on its noble land-

locked firth, with its zostera-oovered mud-flats, or wandering over the bleak moor* of Caithness., lone, barren, and uninteresting to those who see only the outside, but to him rich in records ot the past ; or lingering by the Helmsdale shore, or the coal-pits of Brora, not to admire tho richer corn iieldts that teJl of the changedaoil, : or the noble woods that rise over the terraces of Dunrobin, but to seek in the bi>(U ©f shale, laid bare by tolast winter*, storms, for the fading leaves of more ancient forests, and fragments of wreck left by the tempests of ages long by-gone. But on this portion or the volume, and on many others which wottiad marked foi notice, -we cunnot now dwell as we could have wished to have done. There are some state-nems and conclusions which we would have gladly discussed with the author bad he been spared to speak for himself ; end there are also many trains ot reflection suggested by this work which we' have no spice to follow out. But we must leave these and any formal rpcommendation ot a volume which needs nona at our hand, and conclude 'vith the following account of the Tertiary Flora of Scotland, which forms the not unwoithy peiorauon to the high discussions that have occupied the previous pages :—: — c , " The curtain drops over this ancient Flora of the Oolite in Scotland ; and when, long after, tV ere is a corner of the thick enveloping screen withdrawn, and we catch a partial glimpse of one of the old tertiarj forests of our country, all is new. Trees of the high dicotyledonous class, allied to the plane and the buckthorn, prevail in the landscape, intermingled, however, with dingy funereal yews ; and the ferns and equiseta that rise in the darker openings ot the wood approach to the existing type. , And yet though eons of the past eternity have elapsed teince we last looked out upon cycas and zamias, and the last of calamites, the time is still early, and long ages must elapse ere man shall rise out of the dust, to keep and to dress the fields waving with the productions of yet another and different Flora, and to busy himself with all the labour which he takes under the sun. Our country, in this tertiary time, has still its great outbursts of molten matter, that bury in fiery deluges, many feet in depth, and many square miles in extent, the debris of wide tracts of woodland and marsh ; and the basaltic columns still form m its j great lava bed ; and ever and anon, as the volcanic agencies awake, clouds of ashes darken the heavens and cover up the landscape as it with the accumulated drifts of a protracted snowstorm. Who sh .11 declare what, throughout th'se long ages the history of crea- j tion has been r We see at wide intervals the mere iragments of successive Floras; but know not how what j seem tho blank interspaces were filled, or how, as extinction overlook in succession one tribe of existences after another, and spi-eies, like individuals, yielded to the gieat law of death ; yet other species were brought to the birth and ushered upon the scene, and the chain of being was maintained unbroken. We see only detached bits of th.it green web which has covered our earth e\er since the dry land first appeared; but the web itself seems to have been continuous thioughout all time; though ever, as breadth after breadth issued from the creative loom, the pattern ha« alteied, and the sculpturesque and graceful form 9 that illustrated its first beginnings and its middle spaces have yielded to flowers of richer colour and bloom, and fruits ot fairer shade and outline: and for gigantic club mosses, stretching forth their hiisute arms, goodly tress of the Lord have expanded their gr°at boughs ; and for the barren fern ar>d the calamite, clusteiing in thickets beside the water, or spreading on flowerless hill slopes, luxnriant orchards have yielded their ruddy flush, and rich harvests their golden gleam."