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of elephantine quadrupeds. As the living Indian elephant is more intelligent than the African species, it may possibly also be superior to all the extinct proboscidians of the Sewâlik group; but if so, how could it supply even one of those missing links in the chain of successive development of which we stand in need? For the superiority of man, as compared to the irrational mammalia, is one of kind rather than of degree, consisting in a rational and moral nature, with an intellect capable of indefinite progression, and not in the perfection of his physical organization, or those instincts in which he resembles the brutes.

If, therefore, the doctrine of successive development had been palæontologically true, as I have endeavoured in this discourse to show that it is not;-if the sponge, the cephalopod, the fish, the reptile, the bird, and the mammifer, had followed each other in regular chronological order, the creation of each of those classes being separated from the other by vast intervals of time; and if it were clear that man had been created later by at least one entire period-still I should have been wholly unable to recognize in his entrance upon the earth the last term of one and the same series of developments. Even then, the creation of man would rather seem to have been the beginning of some new and different order of things.

By the creation of a species, I simply mean the beginning of a new series of organic phenomena, such as we usually understand by the term "species." Whether such com

mencements be brought about by the direct intervention of the First Cause, or by some unknown Second Cause or Law appointed by the Author of Nature, is a point upon which I will not venture to offer a conjecture. That some of these species or series of vital phenomena occasionally come to an abrupt termination in our own times, as they have done in every preceding geological epoch, is no longer disputed, and the arguments of those who imagine that new creations entirely ceased from the moment that man was introduced into the globe (the destroying agencies continuing in full activity while the renovating power was suspended), appear to me inconclusive and premature. It would be presumptuous to

assume that the presence of the human race upon the land could affect, still less utterly change, those laws which have governed the organic world in the ocean for millions of years; and if we enlarge our ideas respecting the antiquity of man, and concede those ten thousand or even twenty thousand years which some ethnologists demand in order to account for the early civilization of nations and the origin of their languages, we must hesitate before we affirm that such a period has been one of stagnation or diminished fluctuation in the animate world.

The identity of the fauna and flora of England and the continent of Europe requires us to assign a very distant date to the period when the existing species of animals and plants began to spread themselves over the lands we now inhabit. At the period of such migrations this island was still unitedwith the continent, but a large number of the existing species of mollusca and some other tribes of marine animals can claim a much higher antiquity; so much so that they were already created during the drift or glacial epoch, when the physical geography of Europe bore no resemblance to that now established. If, therefore, ten or twenty thousand years were added to the chronology of the human period, it would still constitute a mere fraction of that vast geological division of time during which the species now our contemporaries have been coming into existence. But how small is the progress yet made by us in ascertaining the order in which the mammalia now living were created! Some species are so ancient as to have co-existed with a fauna of which nearly all the species have died out, while others may be coeval in their origin with man, and a few perhaps are of more recent creation. Man himself has been multiplying on the earth since he entered upon it, and enlarging the range of many animals, both intentionally and against his will. These species occupy, together with the human population, the places left vacant by such as are exterminated from time to time. Whether the amount of change in those ten or twenty thousand years which immediately preceded our own times has been greater or less than the average mutation during equal periods of the past, from the Silurian to the Pliocene

era, is a point on which, in the present infancy of the science, it would be idle to speculate. Of this, however, we may feel assured, that the greater the identity of the system of terrestrial changes, present and future, organic and inorganic, with that which has prevailed throughout past time, the more faithfully shall we be able to interpret the records of creation which are written on the framework of the globe.

Huttonian Theory.

In the first publication of the Huttonian theory, it was declared that we can neither see the beginning nor the end of that vast series of phenomena which it is our business as geologists to investigate. After sixty years of renewed inquiry, and after we have greatly enlarged the sphere of our knowledge, the same conclusion seems to me to hold true. But if any one should appeal to such results in support of the doctrine of an eternal succession, I may reply that the evidence has become more and more decisive in favour of the recent origin of our own species. The intellect of man and his spiritual and moral nature are the highest works of creative power known to us in the universe, and to have traced out the date of their commencement in past time, to have succeeded in referring so memorable an event to one out of a long succession of periods, each of enormous duration, is perhaps a more wonderful achievement of Science, than it would be to have simply discovered the dawn of vegetable or animal life, or the precise time when, out of chaos, or out of nothing, a globe of inanimate matter was first formed.*

On the former Changes of the Alps. By Sir RODERICK IMPEY MURCHISON, F.R.S.†

The complicated structure of the Alps so baffled the penetration of De Saussure, that after a life of toil the first great historian of those mountains declared "there was nothing constant in them except their variety." In citing this opinion, Sir Roderick explained how the obscurity had been gradually

* The anti-development view of Fossil Plants, in our next Number.

† Abstract of a Memoir read to the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in March 7, 1851.

cleared away by the application of modern geology, as based upon the succession of organic remains, and then proceeded to indicate the accumulations of which the Alps were composed, and the changes or revolutions they had undergone, between the truly primæval days when the earliest recognizable animals were created, and the first glacial period in the history of the planet.

The object being to convey in a popular manner clear ideas of the physical condition of these mountains at different periods, three long scene-paintings, prepared for the occasion, represented a portion of the chain at three distinct epochs. The first of these views of ancient nature exhibited the Alps as a long, low archipelago of islands, formed in great part out of the Silurian and older sediments which had been raised above the sea, when the lands bore the tropical vegetation of the carboniferous era.

Stating that there were no relics in the Alps of the formations to which he had assigned the name of Permian, as marking the close of the primeval or paleozoic age, Sir Roderick rapidly reviewed the facts gathered together by many geologists from all quarters of the globe, and maintained that they unequivocally sustained the belief, that there had been a succession of creations from lower to higher types of life, in ascending from inferior to superior formations. He carefully, however, noted the clear distinction between such a creed, as founded on the true records of creation, and the theory of transmutation of species; a doctrine put forth in the popular work entitled the "Vestiges of Creation," and from which he entirely dissented.

In the second painting (an immense lapse of time having occurred) the Alps were represented as a mountainous ridge in which all the submarine formations, from the mediæval up to the older tertiary or Eocene, had been lifted up upon the flank of the primeval rocks. Each rock system being distinguished by a colour peculiar to it, the nature of the animals contained in each of these deposits was succinctly touched upon. Between the youngest of the primæval formations and the oldest of the medieval or secondary rocks, it was stated, that there is not one species in common to the two in any part of Europe; the expression being that "an

entirely new creation had succeeded to universal decay and death."

In speaking of the Alpine equivalents of the British Lias and Oolites, Sir Roderick paid a deep-felt tribute to Dr Buckland, who thirty years ago had led the way in recognizing this parallel; and Leopold von Buch was particularly alluded to as having established these and other comparisons, and as having shewn the extent to which large portions of these mountains have been metamorphosed from an earthy into a crystalline state. In treating of the cretaceous system it was shewn that the Lower Green Sand of England, so well and so long ago illustrated by Dr Fitton, was represented in the Alps by large masses of limestone, since called Neocomian by foreign geologists.

Emphasis was laid upon the remarkable phenomena, that every where in the south of Europe (as in the Alps) the Nummulite rocks, with the "flysch" of the Swiss, and the "macigno" of the Italians, have been raised up into mountains together with the Hippurite and Inocerami rocks, or the chalk on which they rest; and hence it was, that before Sir Roderick made his last survey of the Alps, the greater number of geologists classed the Nummulite rocks with the cretaceous system, and considered them both to be of medieval or secondary age. But judging from the fossils, which differ entirely from those of the chalk (except at the beds of junction) and also from their super-position, he had referred these Nummulite rocks to the true lower tertiary or Eocene of Lyell. Beds of this age, though once merely dark-coloured mud, have been converted into the hard slates of Glarus with their fossil fishes (among which eels and herrings first made their appearance); other strata of this date contain the well known fishes of Monte Bolca; and others again have been rendered so crystalline amid the peaks of the Alps as to resemble primary rocks, so intense have been the metamorphoses!

Dwelling for a few minutes on the atmospheric conditions which prevailed after the elevation of the older tertiary, Sir Roderick inferred that a Mediterranean and genial climate prevailed during all the long period whilst the beds of sand VOL. LI. NO. CI.-JULY 1851.

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