It is a curious fact, to which, in the passing, I must be permitted to call the attention of the reader, that all the leading assertors of the development hypothesis have been bad geologists. Maillet had for his errors and deficiencies the excellent apology that he wrote more than a hundred years ago, when the theory of a universal ocean, promulgated by Leibnitz nearly a century earlier, was quite as good as any of the other theories of the time, and when Geology, as a science, had no existence. And so we do not wonder at an ignorance which was simply that of his age, when we find him telling his readers that plants _must_ have originated in the sea, seeing that “all our habitable lands came originally from the sea;” meaning, of course, by the statement, not at all what the modern geologist would mean were he to employ even the same words, but simply that there was a time when the universal ocean covered the whole globe, and that, as the waters gradually diminished, the loftier mountain summits and higher table-lands, in appearing in their new character as islands and continents, derived their flora from what, in a universal ocean could be the only possible existing flora,—that of the sea. But what shall we say of the equally profound ignorance manifested by Professor Oken, a living authority, whom we find prefacing for the Ray Society, in 1847, the English translation of his “Elements of Physio-philosophy?” “The first creation of the organic took place,” we find him saying, “where the first mountain summits projected out of the sea,—_indeed, without doubt, in India, if the Himalaya be the highest mountain_.” Here, evidently, in this late age of the world, in which Geology _does_ exist as a science, do we find the ghost of the universal ocean of Leibnitz walking once more, as if it had never been laid. Is there now in all Britain even a tyro geologist so unacquainted with geological fact as not to know that the richest flora which the globe ever saw had existed for myriads of ages, and then, becoming extinct, had slept in the fossil state for myriads of ages more, ere the highest summits of the Himalayan range rose over the surface of the deep? The Himalayas disturbed, and bore up along with them in their upheaval, vast beds of the Oolitic system. Belemnites and ammonites have been dug out of their sides along the line of perpetual snow, seventeen thousand feet over the level of the sea. What in the recent period form the loftiest mountains of the globe, existed as portions of a deep-sea bottom, swum over by the fishes and reptiles of the great Secondary period, when what is now Scotland had its dark forests of stately pine,—represented in the present age of the world by the lignites of Helmsdale, Eathie, and Eigg,—and when the plants of a former creation lay dead and buried deep beneath, in shales and fire-clay,—existing as vast beds of coal, or entombed in solid rock, as the brown massy trunks of Granton and Craigleith.