compromise; who laboured on with a noble recklessness, determined
to speak the thing which they had seen, and neither more nor less,
sure that God could take better care than they of His own
everlasting truth. And now they have conquered: the facts which
were twenty years ago denounced as contrary to Revelation, are at
last accepted not merely as consonant with, but as corroborative
thereof; and sound practical geologists - like Hugh Miller, in his
"Footprints of the Creator," and Professor Sedgwick, in the
invaluable notes to his "Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge" -
have wielded in defence of Christianity the very science which was
faithlessly and cowardly expected to subvert it.

But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than for wisdom, you
can find it in such studies, pure and undefiled.

Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy
dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees
significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect
endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of
self-interest and self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region
of solemn joy and wonder. He goes up some Snowdon valley; to him
it is a solemn spot (though unnoticed by his companions), where the
stag's-horn clubmoss ceases to straggle across the turf, and the
tufted alpine clubmoss takes its place: for he is now in a new
world; a region whose climate is eternally influenced by some fresh
law (after which he vainly guesses with a sigh at his own
ignorance), which renders life impossible to one species, possible
to another. And it is a still more solemn thought to him, that it
was not always so; that aeons and ages back, that rock which he
passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now with fern and