The proof of the development theory in the realm of fossil flora he would regard as still more questionable. It had been asserted that in the carboniferous age no exogenous plant had appeared; that before the Lias nature had not succeeded in producing a tree, and that the vegetation of the coal-measures had been 'magnificent immaturities' of the vegetable kingdom. But the quarry of Craigleith, near Edinburgh, alone would refute it, not to speak of the coal-fields of Dalkeith and Falkirk with their araucarians and pines. While Brongniart had denied to the Lower 'Old Red' anything higher than a lichen or a moss, 'the ship carpenter might have hopefully taken axe in hand, to explore the woods for some such stately pine as the one described by Milton: "Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast Of some great ammiral."' It might be thought, however, that to the geological argument from development some consolation might be left from the general fact of the lower producing the higher. Yet even here the Lamarckian theory fails. Fishes were earlier than the beasts of the field and man. But we are still a long way from any proof that 'the peopling of the earth was one of a natural kind, requiring time'; or that the predecessors of man were his progenitors. So far as geology is concerned, superposition is not parental relation, so that there is no necessity for the lower producing the higher. Nor has transmutation of marine into terrestrial vegetation been proved. This had been the mainstay of the Lamarckian hypothesis, and had been adopted from the brilliant but fancifully written _Telliamed_ (an anagram, by the way, of the author's name) of De Maillet by both Oken and Chambers, who had found in the _Delphinidæ_ the marine progenitors of the _Simiadæ_, and through them of man--a curious approximation to some recent crude ideas of Professor Drummond in his _Ascent of Man_. They had pointed to the general or supposed agreement in fauna and flora between the Galapagos and South America, between the Cape de Verde Islands and Africa; yet in such a period of conversion plants of an intermediate character would be found, and thousands of years have failed to produce such a specimen. Thus geology, botany, and zoology would seem to afford slight support to the Darwinian theory, at least in the state of the argument as presented in the _Vestiges_, unless a very large draft upon the mere imagination is made.