withstanding this apparent unfitness of geology to become the handmaid of natural religion, Dr Buckland has produced a work replete with the most popular and interesting details,—pregnant with the deepest instruction,-and calculated to inspire the most affectionate veneration for that great Being who has made even the convulsions of the material world subservient to the civilisation and happiness of his creatures.

The work which we are about to analyze consists of two volumes, one of which is occupied entirely with eighty-seven plates and their description; and we understand that the author has expended on these plates the whole of the thousand pounds bequeathed by Lord Bridgewater. It is impossible to speak too highly of this illustrative volume, both in reference to the selection of the subjects, and the style in which the engravings are executed. The plates, indeed, convey of themselves a lecture on geology to the eye of those who cannot or will not listen or read; while on those who can and will do both, it will impress more deeply the knowledge they have acquired. The first plate is too remarkable to be passed over in silence. It is a coloured imaginary section (nearly four feet long!) of a portion of the earth's crust, intended to express, by the insertion of names and colours, the order and disposition of the stratified rocks, and their relations to the unstratified ones, as far as they have been ascertained; and likewise the dispositions of intruded dykes, metalliferous veins and faults. It forms, in short, an instructive synopsis of the science of geology, and gives a most interesting picture of the ancient history of the globe,-of the revolutions it has undergone, and of the principal plants and animals which have been found in a fossil state in its various formations.

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After a brief introduction on the extent of the province of geology, in which he regards it as comprehending the entire physical history of our planet, Dr Buckland devotes a whole chapter, of nearly thirty pages, to establish the consistency of geological 'discoveries with revelation.' Although there are doubtless, good reasons for entering upon such a discussion, yet to us in Scotland it seemed a work of supererogation. The general principle of the argument was incontrovertibly established by Galileo in his Systema Cosmicum, and in his celebrated letter to Castelli; and the peculiar application of that principle to the speculations of geology, was discussed to exhaustion during the Scottish controversy between the rival theorists. Even the pious Professor of Divinity in our university had adopted the explanations given by the Huttonians, and the public mind was equally tranquillized.

The question, indeed, lies within a narrow compass. The truths of religion and of science can never be at variance. A geological truth must command our assent as powerfully as that of the existence of our own minds, or of the Deity himself; and any revelation which stands opposed to such truths must be false. The geologist has therefore nothing to do with revealed religion in his scientific enquiries. It is the office of the divine to interpret the sacred canon; and if he does it with the discrimination and learning it demands, he will never find it at variance with the deductions of science. If Scripture, on the contrary, is studied by instalments, and viewed from insulated points, and interpreted literally, in its detached passages, we shall find it at variance with itself, and shall reproduce all the heresies which have disgraced the history of the Christian Church. 'But if we look at the sacred scheme as a whole, and generalize its individual propositions, we shall find in it a unity of doctrine, and a law of faith, as unerring as any of those which preside over the material world. In the grandeur and breadth of its creed, the wearied spirit will find its long-sought treasure of moral felicity-that mysterious bond which blends into one community nations of every language, beings of every hue, minds of every order, and hearts bleeding with every variety of grief. And, while the recognition of this principle is absolute and universal, points of science and of civil policy, and the lesser forms of discipline and worship, are left to the conscientious interpretation of individual minds; and give rise to those countless forms of ecclesiastical administration, by which the hallowed doctrine has been surrounded and embalmed.

As Dr Buckland has discussed this part of his subject with much sagacity and good taste, the following observations will be read with interest :

The disappointment of those who look for a detailed account of geological phenomena in the Bible, rests on a gratuitous expectation of finding therein historical information respecting all the operations of the Creator in times and places with which the human race has no concern. As reasonably might he object that the Mosaic history is imperfect, because it makes no specific mention of the satellites of Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn, as feel disappointment at not finding in it the history of geological phenomena, the details of which may be fit matter for an encyclopaedia of science, but are foreign to the objects of a volume intended only to be a guide of religious belief and moral conduct.

We may fairly ask of those persons who consider physical science a fit subject for revelation, what point they can imagine short of a communication of Omniscience at which such a revelation might have stopped, without imperfections, or omissions less in degree, but similar in kind, to that which they impute to the existing narrative of Moses ?

'A revelation of so much only of astronomy as was known to Copernicus would have seemed imperfect after the discoveries of Newton; and a revelation of the science of Newton would have appeared defective to La Place. A revelation of all the chemical knowledge of the eighteenth century would have been as deficient in comparison with the information of the present day as what is now known in this science will probably appear before the termination of another age. In the whole circle of the sciences there is not one to which this argument may not be extended, until we should require from revelation a full developement of all the mysterious agencies that uphold the mechanism of the material world. Such a revelation might, indeed, be suited to beings of a more exalted order than mankind; and the attainment of such knowledge of the works as well as of the ways of God may perhaps form some part of our happiness in a future state. But unless human nature had been constituted otherwise than it is, the above supposed communication of Omniscience would have been imparted to creatures utterly incapable of receiving it under any past or present moral or physical condition of the human race, and would have been also at variance with the designs of all God's other disclosures of himself, the end of which has uniformly been not to impart intellectual, but moral knowledge.

'Several hypotheses have been proposed with a view of reconciling the phenomena of geology with the brief account of creation which we find in the Mosaic narrative. Some have attempted to ascribe the formation of all the stratified rocks to the effects of the Mosaic deluge--an opinion which is irreconcilable with the enormous thiness and almost infinite subdivisions of these strata, and with the numerous and regular successions which they contain of the remains of animals and vegetables, differing more and more widely from existing species as the strata in which we find them are placed at greater depths. The facts that a large proportion of these remains belong to extinct genera, and almost all of them to extinct species, that lived, and multiplied, and died on or near the spots where they are now found, shows that the strata in which they occur were deposited slowly and gradually during long periods of time, and at widely distant intervals. These extinct animals and vegetables could, therefore, have formed no part of the creation with which we are immediately connected.

'It has been supposed by others that these strata were formed at the bottom of the sea during the interval between the creation of man and the Mosaic deluge; and, that at the time of that deluge, portions of the globe which had been previously elevated above the level of the sea, and formed the antediluvian continent, were suddenly submerged, while the ancient bed of the ocean rose to supply their place. To this hypothesis also the facts I shall subsequently advance offer insuperable objections."

Having removed this stumblingblock-this huge boulder which has been rolled from the Scottish capital to the plains of England-Dr Buckland proceeds to point out the evidences of design in the inorganic structures of the globe, and in the fossil remains which these structures contain.

That the earth was fitted up for the occupation of man and the lower animals, and that it has been so constructed as to place within his reach all those products of the mineral kingdom, with

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out which the domestic and the useful arts could never have existed, and which are essential to a state of high civilisation, cannot admit of a reasonable doubt.

By what process the elements of solid, fluid, and gaseous bodies were combined into those forms of matter which are found on the surface, in the atmosphere, and in the bowels of the earth, it is not the province of a sound philosophy to determine. We must take matter as we find it, and endeavour to ascertain the changes it has undergone during successive ages, the agents by which these changes have been effected, and the results to which that agency has given rise.

After the material substratum of the globe was formed, there is reason to suppose that the whole of it was reduced to a fluid state by heat; and therefore while revolving about its axis it would necessarily assume its present form of an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles, and bulging out at the equator. In this incandescent state, the waters of the globe must have been drawn into the atmosphere in the state of steam or vapour; and when the surface had begun to cool by the radiation of its heat into the celestial spaces, these waters would necessarily be precipitated, but would for a long time remain in a state of high temperature, unfitted for the habitation of organized beings.

Dr Buckland has, we think wisely, shunned the controversy respecting the origin and locality of that interior heat which has been the principal agent in the production of geological phenomena. Whether it is the heat of the unrefrigerated and probably fluid nucleus of the globe, or the chemical result of the action of water upon the metallic bases of the earth and alkalis, is a question which belongs to other branches of science; and while it is not only possible, but in our opinion highly probable, that both these agents are at work, it would be imprudent to renounce the assistance which either of them may supply in the explanation of geological phenomena.

After the induration of the crust of the earth, the portions of it which overtopped the waters would become exposed to all the varieties of atmospheric action, and their detritus washed down and carried to the bottom of the sea. By the interior heat to which they would be afterwards subjected, these submarine deposits would be converted into beds of gneiss, mica slate, and Hornblende slate, and clay slate'-the first series of those ⚫ derivative strata which by long continued repetition of similar processes have been accumulated to a thickness of many ⚫ miles.'

That this series was the first, or that the present state of things

had a beginning, may be inferred from the total absence of organic remains throughout the lowest portions of these strata ; and though the Huttonians maintained that no appearances of a beginning were exhibited in the phenomena which they had studied, yet the investigation of the subject of fossil remains which has taken place, principally since their day, has furnished the clearest indications that there was a time when neither animal nor vegetable life existed on our globe. This grand truth is thus powerfully and beautifully established by Dr Buckland:

In these most ancient conditions, both of land and water, geology refers us to a state of things incompatible with the existence of animal and vegetable life; and thus, on the evidence of natural phenomena, establishes the important fact, that we find a starting point, on this side of which all forms, both of animal and vegetable beings, must have had a beginning.

'As in the consideration of other strata we find abundant evidence in the presence of organic remains, in proof of the exercise of creative power, and wisdom, and goodness, attending the progress of life through all its stages of advancement upon the surface of the globe; so, from the absence of organic remains in the primary strata, we may derive an important argument, showing that there was a point of time in the history of our planet (which no other researches but those of geology can possibly approach) antecedent to the beginning of either animal or vegetable life. This conclusion is the more important, because it has been the refuge of speculative philosophers to refer the origin of existing organizations either to an external succession of the same species, or to the formation of more recent from more ancient species, by successive developements, without the interposition of direct and repeated acts of creation, and thus to deny the existence of any first term in the infinite series of successions which this hypothesis assumes. Against this theory no decisive evidence has been accessible until the modern discoveries of geology had established two conclusions of the highest value in relation to this long disputed question; the first proving that existing species have had a beginning, and this at a period comparatively recent in the physical history of our globe; the second showing that they were preceded by several other systems of animal and vegetable life, respecting each of which it may no less be proved that there was a time when their existence had not commenced, and that to these more ancient systems also the doctrine of eternal succession, both retrospective and prospective, is equally inapplicable.

Having this evidence both of the beginning and end of several systems of organized life, each affording internal proof of the repeated exercise of creative design, and wisdom, and power, we are at length conducted back to a period anterior to the earliest of these systems-a period in which we find a series of primary strata wholly destitute of organic remains; and from this circumstance we infer their depositions to have preceded the commencement of organic life. Those who con

tend that life may have existed during the formation of the primary strata, and the animal remains have been obliterated by the effects of heat on strata nearest to the granite, do but remove to one point further