W. G. Barrett

“ Not the united labours of a thousand men for a thousand years could have furnished a better section of the geology of this district than this range of cliffs; it may be regarded as a sort of chance dissection on the earth’s crust. We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz, its dizzy precipices of gneiss, its huge masses of horneblend; we find the secondary rock in another, with its beds of sandstone and shale, its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. ”

“ I do not pretend to teach the Science of Geology; I aspire simply to give a taste for this noble and elevating physical study; and, imperfect as this little manual, written in the few hours of capricious leisure snatched from an incessant strain of engagements, must be, I shall only be too happy, if one and another lay aside my book, and go up higher to Lyell, Sedgwick, Buckland, Murchison, Ansted, Miller, and others. ”

“ I have read my Bible somewhat, and feel a deepening reverence for it, but as yet I have never read that. I see the age of man recorded there; I see the revelation that says the human species is not much more than 6,000 years old; and geology says this testimony is true, for no remains of man have been found even in the tertiary system, the latest of all the geological formations. “The Bible, the writings of Moses,” says Dr. Chalmers, “do not fix the antiquity of the globe; if they fix any thing at all, it is only the antiquity of the species.” ”

“ How multitudinous must have been this one form of life in those ancient days, and how quietly these encrinites, when their brief term of life was over, must have sunk down into the soft calcareous and argillaceous beds lying at the bottom of the old ocean waiting to receive them, only that, mummy like, it might embalm them safely, until in process of time, by upheaval, evaporation, and sun-hardening, their delicate forms should be brought out to our daylight in all the symmetry and beauty of their pre-Adamite life! ”

“ The man who studies nature and who studies his Bible, is not ashamed to say he believes them both; though two books, they are both given by inspiration of God. Man may be a liar, but neither nature nor the Bible can lie; and while one tells us the history of man, the other reveals to us the history of the creation, and succession of those beings which preceded the advent of man.
We now come to the New Red Sandstone, which must occupy our attention both on account of the unique fossil remains found in it, and also on account of its economic use and value in commerce. ”

“ Then why not, when the Almighty created man, did he not create, at the same time, some skeletons of man, and place them in the earth, as he put skeletons of trilobites, fishes, reptiles, and mammals there? Our common sense and reverence both reject the idea. As to the puerile notion that Noah’s flood put them there, did not Noah’s flood overwhelm man as well as animals? and as the bones of man are as durable as the bones of animals, how is it that we never meet with a fossil human skull or thigh bone, or house? ”

“ The tall cliffs at Dover, which Shakspeare would hardly recognise now with their tunnels and railroads, the wavy downs of Sussex and Surrey, the chalk hills of Hampshire, all that piece of Wiltshire called Salisbury Plain, and this line of country stretching away north to bluff Flamborough Head, and running down south to Weymouth and the isle of Purbeck, taking up in its course a good part of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk,—all this immense district, averaging probably a thousand feet in thickness, lay quietly at the bottom of the sea. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the doubter should say, “The intelligence of the day has outgrown our household faiths; men are no longer to be held in trammels of weakness and superstition, or to be dragooned into Religion;—the old story about the Bible, why, you know we can’t receive that, and look upon those compilations that pass by that name as divinely inspired Books; we have long since been compelled to abandon the thought that Christianity has any historic basis, or that its Books have any claim upon the reverence or faith of the nineteenth century, as of supernatural origin.” ”

“ Hitherto we have spoken of the earth’s crust without reference to that wondrous succession and development of living beings which once had their joy of life, and whose fossil remains, found in the different strata, waken such kindling emotions of the power of Deity, and enlarge indefinitely our conceptions of the boundless resources of His Mind. ”

“ Lord Bacon remarks, “Some men think that the gratification of curiosity is the end of knowledge, some the love of fame, some the pleasure of dispute, and some the necessity of supporting themselves by knowledge; but the real use of all knowledge is this, that we should dedicate that reason which was given us by God to the use and advantage of man.” The historian of the old red sandstone, Hugh Miller, to whose researches not only we, but such men as Murchison, Lyell, Ansted, Agassiz and others, are so exclusively indebted, is a philosopher in this last category. ”

“ But what shall we say when the investigations of the microscope have lately revealed to us that these mountains of chalk, instead of being formed of mere inert matter, are, on the contrary, mighty congeries of decayed animal life,—the white apparent particles, of which the chalk masses are composed, being each grain a well-defined organized being, in form still so perfect, their shells so entire, and all their characteristics so discoverable, as to cause no doubt to naturalists as to the species in the animal economy to which they belonged. ”

“ There can be no real contradiction between the truth of Scripture and the truth of Science. Whatever is true in one department of God’s agency, must be true when compared with his works in any other department. As an illustration we may notice one particular in which Geology and Scripture move towards the same point in proving the recent introduction of man. We take up a chart of the earth’s crust, and examine it so far as that crust is open to our investigation: eight miles depth or height we know pretty accurately, and in all these accumulations we find one concurrent testimony. ”

“ Rising up from the granite, we meet in the clay strata corals and trilobites, the first fossil forms of ancient life with which we are acquainted: we rise higher still, for our imaginary start is from the bottom of the earth’s crust, and we meet in other rocks fossil fishes of an extraordinary shape, and once, doubtless, possessed of extraordinary functions ”

“ The God in whom we now live, and move, and have our being, is the same God who gave to these pre-Adamite fish their marvellous structures, minutely but fearfully and wonderfully made, and who, when their joy of life and functions of life had ceased, consigned them to a calm and peaceful grave. ”

“ Now and then I make a dust in your libraries, and inadvertently shoot out sparks and firestones, but nevertheless I am of more use to man than the old granite or the proudest Parian marble; you may get a long way in philosophy, but you will never get beyond coal. ”

“ Granite and its kindred rocks should stand associated with an actual history and poetry, not inferior to the history and poetry of man’s own handiwork; and we believe geology, so often regarded with dread by the uninitiated, will soon be considered worthy a patient and painstaking investigation. Remembering that geology is still an incomplete science, and that we have much yet to learn concerning the laws of organic and inorganic matter, we should be modest in the maintenance of any theory, while thankful for the acquisition of any fact. ”

“ Their hard names—hard to the mere English reader—may possibly alarm the young, who may at present skip the names: let them get to love the science—let them get into the habit of making nature have a meaning in its realities, and into the settled purpose of determining to know what kind of a world this is in which God has cast their lot, and soon these hard names will be only as finger-posts, directing to certain roads on which they may journey to the end of a happy pilgrimage. ”

“ Here we may leave this brief sketch of the Eocene, or lowest beds of the Tertiary. A new creation has been introduced to our view; and although we still wait for the coming of man—the lord and interpreter of all—the contemplation of these successive acts and centres of creation fills our minds with renewed admiration and reverence of Him for whom, and by whom, and to whom are all things. ”

“ Between these mouths of the river a vast surface, half land, half water, from 50 to 100 miles in width, and 300 in length, fringes the whole coast; and there the enormous mass of vegetable matter constantly brought down by the Mississippi is periodically deposited. A few feet are sufficient to bring it above the level of the water, except in great floods; and as soon as that is done, vegetation springs up with the utmost rapidity in that prolific slime. No spectacle can be conceived so dreary and yet so interesting, as the prospect of these immense alluvial swamps in the course of formation. ”

“ Geology is the fossil poetry of the earth; 51such a poetry as those can never dream of who in a pebble see a pebble and nothing more. But to those who walk through this great and beautiful world intent upon finding material for thought and reflection, there is no “picking up a pebble by the wayside without finding all nature in connexion with it;” ”

“ If we will attempt a retrospect, we must look at all these things as evidence of the origin and end of man’s being; and we do thus comprehend, in one view, the whole of the argument—it is impossible for us to arrive at an origin homogeneous with the present order of things. On this subject, the geologist may, therefore, be well content to close the volume of the earth’s physical history, and open that divine record which has for its subject the moral and religious nature of man. ”

“ Our interpretation of Scripture has, undoubtedly, been modified; but the living Word itself abideth, in all its grandeur and purity, for ever. And “the time is not far distant when the high antiquity of the globe will be regarded as no more opposed to the Bible than the earth’s revolution round the sun and on its axis. Soon shall the horizon, where geology and revelation meet, be cleared of every cloud, and present 274only an unbroken and magnificent circle of truth.” ”

“ Carried away from the present into those remote eras, our 81minds revel in the realization of scenery and inhabitants, of which now we possess only the fossil pictures. At the British Museum, we gaze with feelings approaching to repulsion on the stiff and unnatural forms of Egyptian mummies, but with what feelings of profound wonder do we look on these small fishes, so numerous that the relics of them, found in the Orkneys, may be carried away by cartloads! No number of creations can exhaust God, for in Him all fulness dwelleth. ”

“ So imperfectly do we yet understand the redemption wrought for us by Christ; and so obstinate are we in separating what God has united, as though it were impossible for the Tree of Knowledge to stand beside the Tree of Life. ”

“ If, in our previous survey, we have had our minds filled with wonder as we looked at the disinterred relics of past creations, and have gazed at these fossil forms of ancient life with almost a loving interest in their still remaining beauty; so, as 107we now study higher types of life, and behold how “other wonders rise, and seize the soul the prisoner of amaze,” we shall find reason upon reason for the penetration of our minds with the profoundest adoration of Deity. ”

“ Let it not be supposed that this is a mere barren research into dry facts that have no connexion with our truest welfare; for if, as Lord Bacon somewhere finely observes, all study is to be valued “not so mush as an exercise of the intellect, but as a true discipline of humanity,” then what study is calculated to be more useful than Geology, in enlarging and purifying the powers of the mind, by teaching us how harmonious, and orderly, and economic are the works of God ”

“ To us men, constituted as we are, and looking upon death 196as a punishment which must be endured, premature and violent destruction seems to involve unnecessary pain. But such is not the law of nature as it relates to animal life in general. The very exuberance and abundance of life is at once obtained and kept within proper bounds by this rapacity of some great tribes. A lingering death—a natural decay of those powers which alone enable the animal to enjoy life—would, on the contrary, be a most miserable arrangement for beings not endowed with reason, and not assisting each other. ”

“ This fact has now been verified in almost all parts of the globe, and has led to a conviction, that at successive periods of the past, the same area of land and water has been inhabited by species of animals and plants even more distinct than those which now people the antipodes, or which now coexist in the Arctic, temperate, and tropical zones. It appears that, from the remotest periods, there has been ever a coming in of new organic forms, and an extinction of those which pre-existed on the earth, some species having endured for a longer, others for a shorter time ”

“ Its usual position, when not in motion, would be upon its hind feet, resting like a bird, and with its neck set up and curved backwards, to prevent the weight of the enormous head from destroying its equilibrium. Any attempt, however, to picture this strange animal in a living state, would appear to one who has not followed the whole argument to be rather the production of a diseased imagination, than the necessary completion of a sketch of which the main outlines are known to be true. ”

“ For eight long years of struggle, her image gave buoyancy to his spirit, and oneness to his purpose, amidst the ups and downs of no common hardships,—now turned from the rich man’s door by lacqueys in silver lace, and then politely bowed out by those who might have been his patrons in an hour of need, until, fortune favouring the bold, he became not only the recognised poet of the poor, but better still, the husband of a woman of surpassing worth.
Never aspiring to be a great poet, but only a true and real man, he lived, and laboured, and published much. ”