f the old faunas. The great globe, ever
revolving on itself, and journeying in space round the sun, in obedience
to laws which it immortalized a Newton to discover and demonstrate, is
an infinitely more sublime and noble object than the earth of Cosmas
the monk, with its conical mountain and its crypt-like firmament; nor
can I doubt that its history throughout the long geologic ages,--its
strange story of successive creations, each placed in advance of that
which had gone before, and its succeeding organisms, vegetable and
animal, ranged according to their appearance in time, on principles
which our profounder students of natural science have but of late
determined,--will be found in an equal degree more worthy of its Divine
Author than that which would huddle the whole into a few literal days,
and convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit into a
hastily run-up erection of yesterday.

LECTURE ELEVENTH.

ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.[45]

PART I.

Scotland has its four fossil floras,--its flora of the Old Red
Sandstone, its Carboniferous flora, its Oolitic flora, and that flora of
apparently Tertiary age of which his Grace the Duke of Argyll found so
interesting a fragment overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap tuffs
of Mull. Of these, the only one adequately known to the geologist is the
gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures,--probably the richest, in at least
individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others are all but
wholly unknown; and the Association may be the more disposed to tolerate
the comparative meagreness of the few brief remarks which I purpose
making on two of their number,--the floras of the Old Red Sandstone and
the Oolite,--from the consideration that that meagreness is only too
truly representative of the present state of our knowledge regarding
them; and that if my descriptions be scanty and inadequate, it is only
because the facts are still few. How much of the lost may yet be
recovered I know not; but the circumstance that two great
floras,--remote predecessors of the existing one,--which once covered
with their continuous mantle of green the dry land of what is now
Scotland, should be represented by but a few coniferous fossils, a few
cycadaceous fronds, a few ferns and club mosses, must serve to show what
mere fragments of the past history of our country we have yet been able
to recover from the rocks, and how very much in the work of expl