ologian in a
metaphysical age,--when skepticism, conforming to the character of the
time, disseminated its doctrines in the form of nicely abstract
speculations,--had, in order that the enemy might be met in his own
field, to become a skilful metaphysician, he must now, in like manner,
address himself to the tangibilities of natural history and geology, if
he would avoid the danger and disgrace of having his flank turned by
every sciolist in these walks whom he may chance to encounter. It is
those identical bastions and outworks that are _now_ attacked, which
must be _now_ defended; not those which were attacked some eighty or a
hundred years ago. And as he who succeeds in first mixing up fresh and
curious truths, either with the objections by which religion is assailed
or the arguments by which it is defended, imparts to his cause all the
interest which naturally attaches to these truths, and leaves to his
opponent, who passes over them after him as at second hand, a subject
divested of the fire-edge of novelty, I can deem Mr. Longmuir well and
not unprofessionally employed, in connecting with a sound creed the
picturesque marvels of one of the most popular of the sciences, and by
this means introducing them to his people, linked, from the first, with
right associations. According to the old fiction, the look of the
basilisk did not kill unless the creature saw before it was seen;--its
mere _return_ glance was harmless; and there is a class of thoroughly
dangerous writers who in this respect resemble the basilisk. It is
perilous to give them a first look of the public. They are formidable
simply as the earliest popularizers of some interesting science, or the
first promulgators of some class of curious little-known facts, with
which they mix up their special contributions of error,--often the only
portion of their writings that really belongs to themselves. Nor is it
at all so easy to _counteract_ as to _confute_ them. A masterly
confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its
subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated
poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the
poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral
or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to be
on this principle that there exists no confutation of the "Constitution
of Man" in which the ordinary reader finds amusement to carry him
through; wher