moralist, “against that which he knows, because there may be something which he knows not,—he that can set hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty,—is not to be admitted among reasonable beings.” But the honest farmer’s reminiscences of his deceased neighbor the weaver, and his use at second-hand of Hume’s experience-argument, naturally lead me to another branch of the subject. LAMARCKIAN HYPOTHESIS OF THE ORIGIN OF PLANTS. ITS CONSEQUENCES. I have said that the curiously-mixed, semi-marine, semi-lacustrine flora of the Lake of Stennis became associated in my mind, like the ancient _Asterolepis_ of Stromness, with the development hypothesis. The fossil, as has been shown, represents not inadequately the geologic evidence in the question,—the mixed vegetation of the lake may be regarded as forming a portion of the phytological evidence. “All life,” says Oken, “is from the sea. Where the sea organism, by self-elevation, succeeds in attaining into form, there issues forth from it a higher organism. Love arose out of the sea-foam. The primary mucus (that in which electricity originates life) was, and is still, generated in those very parts of the sea where the water is in contact with earth and air, and thus upon the shores. The first creation of the organic took place where the first mountain summits projected out of the water,—indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the highest mountain. _The first organic forms, whether plants or animals, emerged from the shallow parts of the sea._” Maillet wrote to exactly the same effect a full century ago. “In a word,” we find him saying, in his “Telliamed,” “do not herbs, plants, roots, grains, and all of this kind that the earth produces and nourishes, come from the sea? Is it not at least natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable lands came originally from the sea? Besides, in small islands far from the continent, which have appeared but a few ages ago at most, and where it is manifest that never any man had been, we find shrubs, herbs, roots, and sometimes animals. Now, you must be forced to own either that these productions owed their origin to the sea, or to a new creation, which is absurd.”