But after the period of the Chalk, and in the lowest division of the great Tertiary series, terrestrial Mammals appeared again; and in a comparatively short lapse of time, so far as we can judge from the evidence, they multiplied in Genera and Species, and flourished in great abundance. Such facts seem to prove (whether the transmutation scheme be true or false), that conditions, far more than time, have in all ages influenced the progression of animal types.

I will give the reader another example of the Author's logical skill; and it exhibits one of those cases of plausible, verbal sophistry, which have so often cheated men, ill acquainted with facts, into unwarrantable conclusions. After informing us "that (while we are examining the successive deposits of geology) the total mass of animal creation puts on, more and more, the appearance which it now bears," he proceeds to ask us, "if this does not seem to imply that the present system of things is essentially connected with the past; in which case, if the present is a natural system, we have an additional proof that the past was a natural system also?" (p. 162.) No one has ever denied that the whole geological sequence presents a series of true historical monuments. We believe that the successive deposits, of all periods, were formed by natural means; and that the animals entombed within them performed all the functions of life as animals perform them now, and that they flourished under conditions which were in fit accordance with their

organic structure. But the words, natural system,

have two very different meanings in the previous extract. In the first instance, they only mean that natural sequence of organic life which is going on before our eyes from one generation to another: but in their second use they are meant to imply that the animal types of one geological period produced (in the way of natural generation) the new animal types of the next period; and so on, in a regularly ascending order, till we reach the present system of nature, in which species do not change. In other words, that mollusks produced fishes, that fishes generated reptiles, that reptiles generated birds, that birds became mammals, and that monkeys (the highest type of old mammals) became the natural parents of the human family. By a slippery use of the words, natural system, the Author imposes on the careless reader, and perhaps imposes on himself. If this pedigree be true, we may well ask, as Cuvier did nearly forty years since, pourquoi les entrailles de la terre n'ont-elles point conservé les monumens d'une généalogie si curieuse? He found no traces

of it among the rocks above the Chalk; and since his time geologists have spared no pains to discover and interpret the oldest records of creation; and, so far as they have read them, they find not one leaf of this monstrous genealogy; nor is its possible existence suggested by any hint which they have derived from their ancient documents. Here I conclude my remarks on the organic series of the Palæozoic rocks, so far as it bears on the theory of development.

$ 6.

Fossils of the Secondary Division, &c.

While we ascend from the Palæozoic (or Primary) to the lowest Secondary groups, we continually meet with proofs of great internal movements and altered physical conditions. Beds piled on one another, and sometimes in a discordant position-great heaps of conglomerate-abraded fragments ground down into beds of sandstone, marl, and mud, generally of a deep red colour-these are the physical monuments of the period; and they may be traced through the European Continent, and the British Isles, and (with some change of mineral type) through wide tracts of North America. Volcanic action on a vast scale may, perhaps, have supplied the materials whereby the sea in many places became of a deep red colour; and whereby the older types of marine organic life were, through many regions, utterly destroyed. Trees, however, flourished during this time upon the land, and were sometimes washed down into the sea and saved from entire destruction; for we, here and there, find their petrified trunks among these red deposits. Tortoises, gigantic Batrachians, and other strange Reptiles, were, during this tumultuous period, crawling near the margin of the sea; for we sometimes (though rarely) find their bones, but more frequently the marks of their footsteps, on strata deposited at this period between the high- and low-water level.

The whole series of the deposits above noticed is called Trias, and has been divided, by the geologists

of Germany, into three groups-the Bunter-sandstein, the Muschel-kalk, and the Keuper-which are followed in a regular ascending order by the Oolitic series and the Chalk. The middle group of the three (Muschelkalk) abounds in fossils; and it gives us one good marine fauna between the Paleozoic rocks and the Lias which forms the base of the Oolites.

Unfortunately this middle group is not found in the British Isles. Its absence may, I think, be explained by the fact, that all those parts of the sea, out of which in after times rose up our Island, were turbid and deeply tinged by the continued agency of volcanic fires and that great changes of level did take place at this time, is proved by the fact, that the upper part of the New red-sandstone of England is not unusually deposited on the broken edges of the upheaved red beds which we find below them. Be this explanation right or wrong, the sea was for a time less turbid in that part of the world where we now find central Germany and an adjacent part of France, and the contemporaneous deposits were of a more ordinary colour: and in conformity with these conditions there flourished the noble marine fauna of the Muschel-kalk. But this fauna was in its turn destroyed—the sea again became red and turbid; and the Keuper of France and Germany became physically identical with those beds of our New red-sandstone which form the top of the whole series here described, and are packed immediately under the Lias beds and Oolites.

The fossils of the Muschel-kalk give us therefore

the first distinct organic step among the marine deposits, after we leave the Paleozoic rocks, and begin our ascent among those of the great Secondary division. What then are the organic types we find in this fauna of the Muschel-kalk? I will answer this question in the words of the Edinburgh Reviewer: "We do not here find so much as one single species with which we are familiar in the Paleozoic series. All the older Families and Orders have disappeared, and even the Saurians differ in Order from those of the preceding epoch. It is not too much to say that nature has destroyed all her old moulds of workmanship, and begun a new work on a different plan. Yet is there (in those parts of the world where we find the Muschel-kalk) no break or interruption in the regular sequence of deposits. We accept these facts of nature as we find them. The physical conditions of the earth were changed, and Creative Wisdom called into new being organic structures to suit the change. With this we are content; and we defy any man living, whatever may be his knowledge, to prove that in these steps of the great ascending series the stages of advance were very small-only a new stage in the progress of gestation, an event simply natural'-' a development from species to species, phenomena of a simple and a modest character!' Assertions more opposed to the works of ancient nature were never before recorded in the written language of a gratuitous hypothesis *."

See Edinburgh Review, No. CLXV. p. 52; and Vestiges, &c. 3rd Edition, p. 231.