fessor Owen, 'opened up to him new views of the theory of the earth, and a rapid glance, guided by the new and pregnant idea, over other fossil bones, made him anticipate all that he afterwards proved, and determined him to consecrate to this great work the future years of his life.' This was in 1796, and fortunately Cuvier survived till 1832, and had in Owen a worthy successor.

The British Mammoth.

Most of the largest and best preserved tusks of the British mammoth have been dredged up from submerged drift, near the coasts. In 1827, an enormous tusk was landed at Ramsgate: although the hollow implanted base was wanting, it still measured nine feet in length, and its greatest diameter was eight inches; the outer crust was decomposed into thin layers, and the interior portion had been reduced to a soft substance resembling putty. A tusk, likewise much decayed, which was dredged up off Dungeness, measured eleven feet in length; and yielded some pieces of ivory fit for manufacture. Captain Byam Martin, who has recorded this and other discoveries of remains of the mammoth in the British Channel in the Geological Transactions, procured a section of ivory near the alveolar cavity of the Dungeness tusk, of an oval form, measuring nineteen inches in circumference. A tusk dredged up from the Goodwin Sands, which measured six feet six inches in length, and twelve inches in greatest circumference, probably belonged to a female mammoth: Captain Martin describes its curvature as being equal to a semicircle turning outwards on its line of projection. This tusk was sent to a cutler at Canterbury, by whom it was sawn into five sections, but the interior was found to be fossilised and unfit for use; it is now in Captain Martin's possession. The tusks of the extinct elephant which have thus reposed for thousands of years in the bed of the ocean which washes the shore of Britain, are not always so altered by time and the action of surrounding influences as to be unfit for the purposes to which recent ivory is applied. Mr Robert Fitch of Norwich possesses a segment of a mammoth's tusk, which was dredged up by some Yarmouth fishermen off Scarborough, and which was so slightly altered in texture, that it was sawn up into as many portions as there were men in the boat, and each claimed his share of the valuable pro

duct.

Of the tusks referable by their size to the female mammoth which have been disinterred on dry land, I may cite the following instances: A tusk in the Museum of the Geological Society, from the lacustrine pleistocene bed exposed to the action of the sea on the coast of

Essex at Walton, which measures five feet and a half in length; and another from the same locality, in the possession of John Brown, Esq. of Stanway, Essex, which measures four feet in length. A tusk recently discovered near Barnstaple, on a bed of gravel, beneath a stratum of blue clay five feet deep, and one of yellow clay about six feet deep, with several feet of coarse gravel and soil above. This tusk was broken by the pickaxes of the men, but must have been about six feet in length; it had the grain and markings of ivory, but was reduced to the colour and consistency of horn, and retained a considerable degree of elasticity.

A very perfect specimen was dug up entire in 1842, twelve feet below the surface, out of the drift gravel of Cambridge; it measured five feet in length, and two feet four inches across the chord of its curve, and eleven inches in circumference at the thickest part of its base : this tusk was purchased by the Royal College of Surgeons. The smallest mammoth's tusk which I have seen is in the museum of Mr Wickham Flower; it is from the drift or till at Ilford, Essex, and has belonged to a very young mammoth; its length measured along the outer curve is twelve inches and a half, and the cir

cumference of its base four inches. It has nevertheless been evidently put to use by the young animal, the tip having been obliquely worn. moth's tusk, thirty-nine inches long and thirteen inches Mr Robert Bald has described a portion of a mamin circumference, which was found imbedded in diluvial fifteen or twenty feet from the present surface. Two clay at Clifton Hall, between Edinburgh and Falkirk, other tusks of nearly the same size have been discovered at Kilmaurs in Ayrshire, at the depth of seventeen feet and a half from the surface, in diluvial clay. The state of preservation of these tusks was nearly equal to that of the fossil ivory of Siberia; that described by Mr Bald was sold by the workmen who found it to an ivory-turner in Edinburgh for two pounds; it was sawn asunder to be made into chessmen. The tusks of the mammoth found in England are usually more decayed; but Dr Buckland alludes to a tusk from argillaceous diluvium on the Yorkshire coast, which was hard enough to be used by the ivory-turners. A portion of this tusk is now preserved in the museum at Bridlington.

The tusks of the mammoth are so well preserved in the frozen drift of Siberia, that they have long been collected in great numbers for the purposes of commerce. In the account of the mammoth's bones and teeth of Siberia, published more than a century ago in the Philosophical Transactions, tusks are cited which weighed two hundred pounds each, and 'are used as ivory, to make combs, boxes, and such other things; being but a little more brittle, and easily turning yellow by weather or heat.' From that time to the present there has been no intermission in the supply of ivory furnished by the extinct elephants of a former world.

DR CARPENTER-DR ELLIOTSON.

In physiology, DR WILLIAM BENJAMIN CARPENTER has also earned distinction. His chief works are-Principles of General and Comparative Physi ology; Principles of Human Physiology; Vegetable Physiology and Botany; Zoology, and Instinct in Animals; Popular Cyclopædia of Natural Science, seven volumes; Mechanical Philosophy; On the Microscope; &c. These works were produced between 1839 and 1854, and most of them have gone through several editions. Mr Morell, in his History of Modern Philosophy, has said that Dr Carpenter's works 'manifest some of the best qualities both of the thinker and the observer.' The father of the physiologist, DR LANT CARPENTER (1780-1840), was a well-known Unitarian minister, and writer on education and theology. DR JOHN ELLIOTSON, a London physician, in 1840 published Human Physiology, and afterwards attracted attention by lectures on phrenology and mesmerism. He procured the establishment of a mesmeric hospital, and set up a periodical, The Zoist, in support of his physiological opinions. Mr Thackeray dedicates his novel of Pendennis to Dr Elliotson, in acknowledgment of his medical skill, 'great goodness, and kindness,' for which the physician would take no other fee but thanks. This kind physician died in 1858, aged eighty.

HUGH MILLER.

As a popular illustrator of geology, no author approaches HUGH MILLER, the self-taught man of science and genius. He was a native of Cromarty, born October 10, 1802. He was of a race of seafaring men well to do in the world, who owned coasting-vessels, and built houses in the town of Cromarty. One of them had done a little in the

hours each, but he was compelled by further study to believe that the days of creation were not natural but prophetic days-unmeasured eras of time stretching far back into the bygone eternity. The revelation to Moses he supposes to have been optical-a series of visions seen in a recess of the Midian desert, and described by the prophet in language fitted to the ideas of his times. The hypothesis of the Mosaic vision is old-as old as the time of Whiston, who propounded it a century and a half since; but in Miller's hands the vision becomes a splendid piece of sacred poetry.

The Mosaic Vision of Creation.

Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by Milton of that vision of the future which he represents as conjured up before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A 'great darkness' first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the 'horror;' and as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, Let there be light,' and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter-it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night.

The light again brightens-it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great sea-invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or gray, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere, they lie, thick and manifold-an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere--of a firmament stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below. But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the morning have completed the second day.

Yet, again, the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of

foam, nearer at hand, against the low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely spread country. For at the Divine command the land has arisen from the deepnot inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet further fiat has covered them with the great carboniferbearing trees-of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic ous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of coneclub-mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky overhead; as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on, and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full-orbed in the east-to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens-and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea. Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pine-woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas; or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its monsters: great tanninim tempest the deep, as they heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a 'seething pot or caldron.' Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends-the support and preservation of the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young.

Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the field graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature-the lion, the leopard, and the bear-harbour in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases for ever upon the earth. The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet another morrow-the morrow of God's rest-that Divine Sabbath in which there is no more creative labour, and which, 'blessed and sanctified' beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special

object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And over it no evening is represented in the record as falling, for its special work is not yet complete. Such seems to have been the sublime panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to

The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of chaos;

and, rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details.

The subject of the Noachian deluge is discussed at length, Miller holding with Stillingfleet, Poole, and modern authorities, that the deluge was partial as to the earth, but universal as to the human race. There was no novelty in this portion of his argument, and he sometimes misconstrues the opinions of those he opposes. His earnestness and fertility of illustration enchain the reader's attention, but a reperusal only the more convinces us that Mr Miller's great power lay in description —not in grappling with the difficulties of speculative philosophy. We give a few more specimens of his exquisite composition.

The Fossil Pine-tree.

But let us trace the history of a single pine-tree of the Oolite, as indicated by its petrified remains. This gnarled and twisted trunk once anchored its roots amid the crannies of a precipice of dark-gray sandstone, that rose over some nameless stream of the Oolite, in what is now the north of Scotland. The rock, which, notwithstanding its dingy colour, was a deposit of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, formed a member of the fish-beds of that system-beds that were charged then, as now, with numerous fossils, as strange and obsolete in the creation of the Oolite as in the creation which at present exists. It was a firm, indestructible stone, covered by a thin, barren soil; and the twisted rootlets of the pine, rejected and thrown backwards from its more solid planes, had to penetrate into its narrow fissures for a straitened and meagre subsistence. The tree grew but slowly in considerably more than half a century it had attained to a diameter of little more than ten inches a foot over the soil; and its bent and twisted form gave evidence of the life of hardship to which it was exposed. It was, in truth, a picturesque rag of a tree, that for the first few feet twisted itself round like an overborne wrestler struggling to escape from under his enemy, and then struck out at an abrupt angle, and stretched itself like a bent arm over the stream. It must have resembled, on its bald eminence, that pine-tree of a later time described by Scott, that high above 'ash and oak'

Cast anchor in the rifted rock,
And o'er the giddy chasm hung
His shattered trunk, and frequent flung,
Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high,
His boughs athwart the narrowed sky.

The seasons passed over it: every opening spring gave its fringe of tenderer green to its spiky foliage, and every returning autumn saw it shed its cones into the stream below. Many a delicate fern sprang up and decayed around its gnarled and fantastic root, singleleaved and simple of form, like the Scolopendria of our caverns and rock recesses, or fretted into many a slim pinnate leaflet, like the minute maiden-hair or the graceful lady-fern. Flying reptiles have perched amid its boughs; the light-winged dragon-fly has darted on wings of gauze through the openings of its lesser twigs; the tortoise and the lizard have hybernated during the chills of winter amid the hollows of its roots; for many years it formed one of the minor features in a wild picturesque

scene, on which human eye never looked; and at length, touched by decay, its upper branches began to wither and bleach white in the winds of heaven; when shaken by a sudden hurricane that came roaring adown the ravine, the mass of rock in which it had been anchored at once gave way, and, bearing fast jammed among its roots a fragment of the mass which we still find there, and from which we read a portion of its Dancing on the eddies, or lingering amid the pools, or story, it was precipitated into the foaming torrent. shooting, arrow-like, adown the rapids, it at length finds its way to the sea; and after sailing over beds of massive coral-the ponderous Isastrea and more delicate Thamnastrea-and after disturbing the Enaliosaur and Belemnite in their deep green haunts, it sinks, saturated with water, into a bed of arenaceous mud, to make its ance, after long ages, in the world of man—a marble mummy of the old Oolite forest-and to be curiously interrogated regarding its character and history.

appear

The National Intellect of England and Scotland. has not attained: our first men stand in the second There is an order of English mind to which Scotland rank, not a foot-breadth behind the foremost of England's second-rank men; but there is a front rank of British intellect in which there stands no Scotchman. Like that class of the mighty men of David, to which Abishai and Benaiah belonged-great captains, who went down into pits in the time of snow and slew lions, or' who lifted up the spear against three hundred men at once, and prevailed'-they attained not, with all their greatness, to the might of the first class. Scotland has produced no Shakspeare; Burns and Sir Walter Scott united would fall short of the stature of the giant of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a representative. A Scotch poet has been injudiciously named as not greatly inferior, but I shall not do wrong to the memory of an ingenious young man [Pollock], cut off just as he had mastered his powers, by naming him again in a connection so perilous. He at least was guiltless of the comparison; and it would be cruel to involve him in the ridicule which it is suited to excite. Bacon is as exclusively unique as Milton, and as exclusively English; and though the grandfather of Newton was a Scotchman, we have certainly no Scotch Sir Isaac. I question, indeed, whether any Scotchman attains to the powers of Locke: there is as much solid thinking in the Essay on the Human Understanding, greatly as it has become the fashion of the age to depreciate it, and notwithstanding his fundamental error, as in the works of all our Scotch metaphysicians put together. It is, however, a curious fact, and worthy, certainly, of careful examination, as bearing on the question of development purely through the force of circumstances, that all the very great men of England-all its first-class men-belong to ages during which the grinding persecutions of the Stuarts repressed Scottish energy, and crushed the opening mind of the country; and that no sooner was the weight removed, like a pavement slab from over a flower-bed, than straightway Scottish intellect sprung up, and attained to the utmost height to which English intellect was rising at the time. The English philosophers and literati of the eighteenth century were of a greatly lower stature than the Miltons and Shakspeares, Bacons and Newtons, of the two previous centuries; they were second-class men-the tallest, however, of their age anywhere; and among these the men of Scotland take no subordinate place. Though absent from the competition in the previous century, through the operation of causes palpable in the history of the time, we find them quite up to the mark for the age in which they appear. No English philosopher for the last hundred and fifty years produced a greater revolution in human affairs than Adam Smith; or exerted a more powerful influence on opinion than David Hume; or did more to change the face of the