OOLITIC SYSTEM OF SCOTLAND.

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of idea into yet minuter ramifications, when we thus findthat, along these old Oolitic shores of Scotland , as along theshores of our country in the present day, the rocks were in-habited by their hermit shells,—the Edomites of the mollus-cous world, as a modem naturalist poetically terms them,—that spent silent lives in excavating for themselves cells inthe stone, in which they watched in patience for the foodbrought them by wavelet and current, and which, like thecells of so many other anchorites and recluses, were ultimatelyto prove their sepulchres. The idea that stones and rocksshould be thus inhabited is an idea old as eternity: it musthave had being as am idea ere the existence of rock, or coral,or molluscous life; for He from whom it emanated saw theend from the beginning, and makes no accessions to his fundof thought; and to be permitted thus to trace it towards itssource, and to detect it embodied in a creation whose lastsurviving organism perished myriads of ages ago, enables usin some degree to conceive of the fact, and to conceive alsoof the fixed character, of that Master Existence, the Authorof all, who said, in a long posterior age, when revealing Him-self to man, “I am the Lord; I change not”