Chapter II: Preface

Nearly one third of the present volume appeared a few months ago in the form of a series of sketches in the _Witness_ newspaper. A portion of the first chapter was submitted to the public a year or two earlier, in _Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_. The rest, amounting to about two thirds of the whole, appears for the first time.

Every such work has its defects. The faults of the present volume--faults all too obvious, I am afraid--would have been probably fewer had the writer enjoyed greater leisure. Some of them, however, seem scarce separable from the nature of the subject: there are others for which, from their opposite character, I shall have to apologize in turn to opposite classes of readers. My facts would, in most instances, have lain closer had I written for geologists exclusively, and there would have been less reference to familiar phenomena. And had I written for only general readers, my descriptions of hitherto undescribed organisms, and the deposits of little-known localities, would have occupied fewer pages, and would have been thrown off with, perhaps, less regard to minute detail than to pictorial effect. May I crave, while addressing myself, now to the one class, and now to the other, the alternate forbearance of each?

Such is the state of progression in geological science, that the geologist who stands still for but a very little, must be content to find himself left behind. Nay, so rapid is the progress, that scarce a geological work passes through the press in which some of the statements of the earlier pages have not to be modified, restricted, or extended in the concluding ones. The present volume shares, in this respect, in what seems the common lot. In describing the _Coccosteus_, the reader will find it stated that the creature, unlike its contemporary the _Pterichthys_, was unfurnished with arms. Ere arriving at such a conclusion, I had carefully examined at least a hundred different _Coccostei_; but the positive evidence of one specimen outweighs the negative evidence of a hundred; and I have just learned from a friend in the north, (Mr. Patrick Duff, of Elgin,) that a Coccosteus lately found at Lethen-bar, and now in the possession of Lady Gordon Gumming, of Altyre, is furnished with what seem uncouth, paddle-shaped arms, that project from the head.[A] All that I have given of the creature, however, will be found true to the actual type; and that parts should have been omitted will surprise no one who remembers that many hundred belemnites had been figured and described ere a specimen turned up in which the horny prolongation, with its enclosed ink-bag, was found attached to the calcareous spindle; and that even yet, after many thousand trilobites have been carefully examined, it remains a question with the oryctologist, whether this crustacean of the earliest periods was furnished with legs, or creeped on an abdominal foot, like the snail.

[Footnote A: As these paddle-shaped arms have not been introduced by Agassiz into his restoration of the _Coccosteus_, their existence, at least as arms, must still be regarded as problematical. There can be no doubt, however, that they existed as plates of very peculiar form, and greatly resembling paddles, and that they served in the economy of the animal some still unaccounted for purpose.]

I owe to the kindness of Mr. Robertson, Inverugie, the specimen figured in Plate V., fig. 7, containing shells of the only species yet discovered in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. They occur in the Lower Formation of the system, in a quarry near Kirkwald, in which the specimen figured, with several others of the same kind, was found by Mr. Robertson, in the year 1834. In referring to this shell, page 99,[B] I have spoken of it as a delicate bivalve, much resembling a Venus; drawing my illustration, naturally enough, when describing the shell of an ocean deposit, rather from among marine, than fluviatile testacea. I have since submitted it to Mr. Murchison, who has obligingly written me that he "can find no one to say more regarding it than that it is very like a _Cyclas_." He adds, however, that it must be an ocean production notwithstanding, seeing that all its contemporaries in England, Scotland, and Russia, whether shells or fish, are unequivocally marine.

[Footnote B: Page 90 of the present edition.]

With the exception of two of the figures in Plate IX., the figures of the _Cephalaspis_ and the _Holoptychius_, and one of the sections in the Frontispiece, section 2, all the prints of the volume are originals. To Mr. Daniel Alexander, of Edinburgh,--a gentleman, who to the skill and taste of the superior artist, adds no small portion of the knowledge of the practical geologist,--I am indebted for several of the drawings; that of fig. 2 in Plate V., fig. 1 in Plate VI., fig. 2 in Plate VIII., and figs. 3 and 4 in plate IX. I am indebted to another friend for fig. 1, in Plate VII. Whatever defects may be discovered in any of the others, must be attributed to the untaught efforts of the writer, all unfamiliar, hitherto, with the pencil, and with by much too little leisure to acquaint himself with it now.

AMERICAN PUBLISHERS' NOTICE.

The publishers take pleasure in presenting to the American reader this interesting work of Hugh Miller, in which are restored to our view some of the phenomena which occurred in the earlier formations of the crust of the earth, belonging to those inconceivably remote ages when living things first appeared;--a work so scientific, and yet so illustrated with familiar objects and scenes, as to be well understood by those little versed in Geology. The grand conclusions which the author deduces from apparently trifling circumstances that every one has noticed a hundred times, without being the wiser, illustrate the difference between the philosopher and the common observer; and the simple and pictorial style in which they are delineated renders the work peculiarly fascinating.

This is a reprint of the fourth English edition, without additions or alterations, excepting the omission of the prefatory Notes to the second and third editions. In the first of these, the author states that he had added about fifteen pages to the first edition, chiefly relating to that middle formation of the system to which the organisms of Balruddery and Carmylie belong, the representative of the Cornstones in England. Some matters there given as merely conjectural were also replaced by ascertained facts. In the latter, he announces that the somewhat bold prediction made by him in the first edition, in 1841, that the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone would be found at least equal to those of all the geological formations united, at the death of Cuvier, was already more than fulfilled. Cuvier enumerated ninety-two species of fossil fishes; Agassiz, in 1846, enumerated one hundred and five in the Old Red Sandstone alone, a formation which had been regarded as poorer in organisms than any other. In this edition was given the list of species, as determined and arranged by Professor Agassiz. Many additions in the shape of notes were also made.

In the first two editions it was stated that there was a gradual increase of size observable in the progress of ichthyolic life, and that the Old Red System exhibited, in its successive formations, this gradation of bulk, beginning with an age of dwarfs, and ending with an age of giants. Since then, it has been ascertained that there were giants among the dwarfs. The remains of one of the largest fish found any where, has been discovered in its lowest formation; whereby he was convinced that the theory of a gradual progression in size, from the earlier to the later Palæozoic formations, though based originally on no inconsiderable amount of negative evidence, must be permitted to drop. On this fact he has based his incontrovertible argument against the "development theory" in his more recent work, already given to the American Public, "Foot-Prints of the Creator."

Boston, _January_, 1851.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAGE

The Working-man's true Policy.--His only Mode of acquiring
Power.--The Exercise of the Faculties essential to
Enjoyment.--No necessary Connection between Labor and
Unhappiness.--Narrative.--Scenes in a Quarry.--The two
dead Birds.--Landscape.--Ripple Markings on a Sandstone
Slab.--Boulder Stones.--Inferences derived from their
water-worn Appearance.--Sea-coast Section.--My first
discovered Fossil.--Lias Deposit on the Shores of the Moray
Frith.--Belemnite.--Result of the Experience of half a Lifetime
of Toil.--Advantages of a Wandering Profession in Connection
with the Geology of a Country.--Geological Opportunities of the
Stone-Mason.--Design of the present Work, 1-14