Notice of some remarks by the late Mr. Hugh Miller, author of The testimony of the rocks, The old red sandstone, &c. &c.
- Date:
- 1857
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Notice of some remarks by the late Mr. Hugh Miller, author of The testimony of the rocks, The old red sandstone, &c. &c. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![represents me as unfairly laboring, in this very composition, to make it be believed that the wliole Palaeozoic period was charac- terized by a gorgeous flora ;* and as thus sophistically gene- ralizing in the first instance, in order to make a fallacious use of the generalization in the second, with the intention of misleading non-geological readers. Such, however, as may be seen from the following extracts from the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Science at Philadelphia, is the charge preferred against me by a citizen of the United States. Mr. William Parker Foulke asked the attention of the So- ciety to a lecture by Mr. Hugh Miller, recently published in the United States under the title of ' The Two Records, Mosaic and Geological,' and made some remarks upon the importance of maintaining a careful scrutiny of the logic of the natural sci- ences Mr. Miller teaches that, in the attempt to reconcile the two 'records,' there are only three periods to be accounted for by the geologist, viz. < the period of plants ; the period of great sea monstsrs and creeping things ; and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth ;' arid that the first of these pe- riods is represented by the rocks grouped under the term Palce- ozoic, and is distinguished from the Secondary and Tertiary chiefly by its gorgeous flora ; and that the geological evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, pecu- liarly a period of herbs and trees, yielding seed after their kind. The general reader, not familiar with the details of geological arrangement, could not fail to infer from such a statement, used for such a purpose, that the Palaeozoic rocks are regarded by geologists as forming one group representative of one period, which can properly be said to be distinguished as a whole by its gorgeous flora; and that it is properly so distinguished for the * [It was not said that the author asserted this as a geological fact; but that he used an argument which logically required the assumption of such a characteristic to make the reasoning valid. The reader is requested to recur to page 2.] r](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22268960_0011.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
