382

THE FOSSILIFEROUS DEPOSITS

Such is a view, all too inadequate, and yet, I fear, not alittle tedious, both of the several fields in which our geologicmembers have still much labour before them, and of what aScottish museum, truly national, should represent. Thoughthe breaks and hiatuses are many, there are still noble mate-rials within the limits of our country for the composition ofits pre-Adamic history,—that history of which the record isin the rocks, and of which organisms are the significant andimpressive characters. The very gaps which occur in thelong chronicle serve all the more strongly to divide it intoperiods, each furnished with its own independent group ofbeing, specifically unlike that which went before, or thatwhich followed after, and suited to remind us all the moreemphatically in consequence, that to every species that everlived in the old geologic ages there came a “last day.” Wehave been long accustomed to recognise the inexorable reignof death in its relation to individuals, and to regard it as oneof the most assured and certain of all things, that as all whohave lived upon our earth during the ages of the past havedied, so it is “ appointed for all” who now live upon it “ onceto die.” The same experience which leads us to anticipatethat the sun will rise and set to-morrow, just because thesun has risen and set during all the many days of the past,leads us also to anticipate that all the individual creatureswhich now inhabit the earth will die, just because all theindividual creatures which inhabited the earth in the bygoneages have died. And now we find geology extending thisuniform experience of death from individuals to species, andcompelling us to believe, on the strength of the argumentto which we so unhesitatingly yield in the other cases, thatas all the species of the past have died, so it is destined forall the species of the present also to die. The theologian hadto contend in the last age with a class of sceptics who,—their scepticism assuming, as is not very uncommon, the form