Chambers and his school had largely subscribed to the doctrines of Oken, by which no organism had been created of larger size than an infusorial point, and no organism created which was not microscopic; whatever exists larger, man himself included, having been developed and not created. To this Miller replies that this at least is not the testimony of the rocks. If it were true, it would follow that the oldest fossils would be small, and low in organisation. But, so far is this from being the case that the oldest organisms, whether that be the _asterolepis_ or the _cephalaspidæ_ or the _acanthidæ_, are large and high. One asterolepis found at Thurso measures over twelve feet, and a Russian specimen described by Professor Asmus of Dorpat seems to have reached the astonishing length of twenty-three feet. Thus, the earliest organisms 'instead of taking their place, agreeably to the demands of the development hypothesis, among the sprats, sticklebacks, and minnows of their class, took their place among its huge and basking sharks, gigantic sturgeons, and bulky sword-fishes. They were giants, not dwarfs.' The prevalence of the brachiopods in the Silurian period over the _cephalaspidæ_ proves little. What the naturalist has to deal with is not quantity but quality, 'not the number of the low, but the standing of the high. A country may be distinctly a country of flocks and herds, or a country of carnivorous mammalia, or like New South Wales or the Galapagos, a country of marsupial animals or of reptiles. Its human inhabitants may be merely a few hunters or shepherds, too inconsiderable in numbers to give it any peculiar standing as a home of men. But in estimating the highest point in the scale to which the animal kingdom has attained, it is of the few men, not of its many beasts, that we must take note.' Thus he maintains that the existence of a single cephalopod or one cuttlefish among a wilderness of brachiopods is sufficient to indicate the mark already attained in the scale of being, just as the existence of the human family, when restricted to a pair, indicated as clearly the scale as when its existence can be counted by millions. Under the clearing-system in the Western Highlands, Miller had, during 'the cruise of the Betsey,' noticed in the island of Rum a single shepherd and eight thousand sheep. Yet the human unit, to the naturalist, would outweigh all the lower organisms. Moreover, the brachiopods of the palæozoic age he would regard as larger than those existing now which have sunk by 'degradation' into inferior importance.