The Foot-prints of the Creator

“When I asked him how this earth could have been repeopled if ever it had undergone the same fate it was threatened with by the comet of 1680, he answered,—‘that required the po...

Mr. Miller was born at Cromarty, of humble but respectable parents, whose history would have possessed no inconsiderable interest, even if it had not derived one of a higher kin...

“But let us quit this wonderful city of the dead, with all its reclining obelisks, and all its sculptured tumuli, the memorials of a race that exist only in their tombs. And yet...

In the earliest vertebrate period, namely, the Silurian, our author shews that the fishes were homologically symmetrical in their organization, as exhibited in the Placoids. In...

This busy seaport town forms that special centre, in this northern archipelago, from which the structure of the entire group can be most advantageously studied. The geology of t...

Nor does the purely Christian objection to the development hypothesis seem less, but even more insuperable than that derived from the province of natural theology. The belief wh...

So far as is yet known, all the fish of the earliest fossiliferous system belonged to the placoid or “_broad plated_” order,—a great division of fishes, represented in the exist...

The most ancient brain-bearing craniums that have come down to us in the fossil state, are those of the Ganoids of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; and in these fishes the true skul...

In a collection of miscellaneous fragments sent me by Mr. Dick from the rocks of Thurso, I detected patches of palatal teeth ranged in nearly the quadratures of circles, and whi...

The inner surface of the cranial buckler of _Asterolepis_, (fig. 28,)—that which rested on the cartilaginous box which formed the creature’s interior skull,—stands out in bolder...

Of the bone represented in fig. 42, I have determined, from a Cromarty specimen, the place and use: it formed the interior base to which one of the ventral fins was attached. In...

It has been confidently asserted, not merely that it _may_, but that it _does_. Ever since the publication, in 1839, of Sir Roderick Murchison’s great work on the Silurian Syste...

One of the best marked Placoids of the Upper Ludlow bone-bed is that _Onchus Murchisoni_ to which the distinguished geologist whose name it bears refers, in his communication, a...

Let the reader now mark the use which has been made, by the author of the “Vestiges,” of the name and authority of Linnæus. “Linnæus,” he states, “was so impressed by the low ch...

In the first place, let us remark, that the cartilaginous structure of the Placoids bears no very striking analogy to the cartilaginous structure of the higher vertebrata in the...

Though all animals be fitted by nature for the life which their instincts teach them to pursue, naturalists have learned to recognize among them certain aberrant and mutilated f...

Now, in tracing the geologic history of the ichthyic tail, we find these several steps or gradations from the heterocercal to the homocercal, represented by periods and formatio...

Beyond the Coal Measures terrestrial plants become extremely rare. The fossil botanist, on taking leave of the lower Carboniferous beds, quits the land, and sets out to sea; and...

Several thousand years ago, ere the upheaval of the last of our raised beaches, there existed somewhere on the British coast a submarine bed, rich in sea-weed and the less destr...

“All life,” says Oken, “is from the sea. Where the sea organism, by self-elevation, succeeds in attaining into form, there issues forth from it a higher organism. Love arose out...

Let the reader remark further, the bearing of those facts from which this principle of geological reasoning has been derived, on the development hypothesis. We find species rest...

But in what form, it may be asked, or with what limitations, ought the Christian controversialist to avail himself, in this question, of the experience argument? Much ought to d...

The author of the “Vestiges” is evidently a practised and tasteful writer, and his work abounds in ingenious combinations of thought; but those powers of abstract reflection on...

This is surely a very strange statement. Waiving altogether the _general_ fact, that great original discoverers in any department of knowledge are never men of one science or on...

Now, a partially consolidated planet, tempested by frequent earthquakes of such terrible potency, that those of the historic ages would be but mere ripples of the earth’s surfac...

The poet could scarce have anticipated that there was a science then sleeping in its cradle, and dreaming the dreams of Whiston, Leibnitz, and Burnet, which was one day to rise...

But it may be judged that I am trespassing on a field into which I have no right to enter. Save, however, for its close proximity with that in which the geologist expatiates as...

“DEAR SIR,—I have examined the structure of the fossil wood which you found in the Old Red Sandstone at Cromarty, and have no hesitation in stating, that the reticulated texture...

_AGASSIZ AND GOULD’S PRINCIPLES OF ZOÖLOGY_; Touching the Structure, Development, Distribution, and Natural Arrangement, of the RACES OF ANIMALS, living and extinct, with numero...