ent state_ well calculated to fulfil."

It may be worth mentioning, that the writer who sets himself after a
fashion so peculiar to assert and justify the ways of Providence against
the geologists resides in one of the loveliest districts in Scotland,--a
district, however, shaggy with rock, and overshadowed by great
mountains, and occasionally visited by earthquake tremors, and both snow
and thunder storms, and so, with all its wild beauty to other eyes,
merely, I must suppose, one of the rougher districts of the penal
Siberia in his. He is, indeed, particularly severe upon mountains;
though not, as he tells us, wholly devoid of a lurking prejudice in
their favor. But what weak prejudice might palliate or plead for, his
better judgment condemns. "See," says this judicious writer, "vast
districts of the globe disfigured by tremendous masses of rugged and
almost barren mountains.... What, cry some, would you bury as
deformities the lofty peak and rugged mountain brow, nature's
palaces,--generally the grandest and most sublime objects in natural
scenery! We cordially assure the reader we are by no means prejudiced
against these grand objects; _for if prejudice we have on the subject,
it is rather on the other side_. It is therefore the force of evidence
alone makes us,--reluctantly we admit,--give up these to rank among the
derangements and deformities of nature. She, according to her usual
_taste_ and _economy_, would never be at the expense of rearing, and
that upon ground _that might have otherwise been much better occupied_,
such unwieldy, useless masses of matter, merely for the sake of
gratifying the taste for grandeur and sublimity in a few of her sons,
nor, indeed, for any other use we ever heard ascribed to them....
According to _our_ test, a rich and gently undulatory surface,
intersected with rivulets and sheets of water, in the places taken up by
these elevations, would be far better, as combining in the highest
degree the _utile cum dulce_."[40] To such of my audience as are
familiar with Dr. Thomas Burnet's "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1684),
that revolution in the cycle of hypothesis to which I have referred, and
through which the visionaries of the later ages return to the dreams
which had occupied the visionaries of an earlier time, must be
sufficiently apparent in this passage. For not only does Burnet speak
after the same manner of hills and mountains, but also of an idle,
ill-founded prejudice entertai