At this point we shall first quote one of the earliest palaeontologists, and one of the most famous, Hugh Miller, whose _"Old Red Sandstone,"_ first published in 1841, has now been republished in the _"Everyman Library."_ In this brilliant work, Miller pays his respects to the evolutionists of his age. He refers to Lamarck and says: "The ingenious foreigner, on the strength of a few striking facts which prove that to a certain extent the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, and their forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior order of being towards the superior, and that the off-spring of creatures low in the scale in the present time may hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand years hence. . . . He has argued on this principle of improvement and adaptation,--which, carry it as far as we rationally may, still leaves the vegetable a vegetable, and the dog a dog,--that in the vast course of ages, inferior have risen into superior natures, and lower into higher races; that molluscs and zoophytes have passed into fish and reptiles, and fish and reptiles into birds and quadrupeds; that unformed gelatinous bodies, with an organisation scarcely traceable, have been metamorphosed into oaks and cedars; and that monkeys and apes have been transformed into human creatures, capable of understanding and admiring the theories of Lamarck.