Glaucus | Page 6

to be warped or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty
notion that they contradicted His other messages. When a few more
years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell,

Delabˆche and Phillips, Forbes and Jamieson, and the group of brave
men who accompanied and followed them, will be looked back to as
moral benefactors of their race; and almost as martyrs, also, when it is
remembered how much misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly
they had to endure from well-meaning fanatics like Fairholme or
Granville Penn, and the respectable mob at their heels who tried (as is
the fashion in such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact
and the Bible, by twisting facts just enough to make them fit the
fancied meaning of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit
the fancied meaning of the facts. But there were a few who would have
no compromise; who laboured on with a noble recklessness,
determined to speak the thing which they had seen, and neither more
nor less, sure that God could take better care than they of His own
everlasting truth. And now they have conquered: the facts which were
twenty years ago denounced as contrary to Revelation, are at last
accepted not merely as consonant with, but as corroborative thereof;
and sound practical geologists - like Hugh Miller, in his "Footprints of
the Creator," and Professor Sedgwick, in the invaluable notes to his
"Discourse on the Studies of Cambridge" - have wielded in defence of
Christianity the very science which was faithlessly and cowardly
expected to subvert it.
But if you seek, reader, rather for pleasure than for wisdom, you can
find it in such studies, pure and undefiled.
Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams.
The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees
significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly
interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest
and self-pleasing, into a pure and wholesome region of solemn joy and
wonder. He goes up some Snowdon valley; to him it is a solemn spot
(though unnoticed by his companions), where the stag's-horn clubmoss
ceases to straggle across the turf, and the tufted alpine clubmoss takes
its place: for he is now in a new world; a region whose climate is
eternally influenced by some fresh law (after which he vainly guesses
with a sigh at his own ignorance), which renders life impossible to one
species, possible to another. And it is a still more solemn thought to
him, that it was not always so; that aeons and ages back, that rock
which he passed a thousand feet below was fringed, not as now with

fern and blue bugle, and white bramble-flowers, but perhaps with the
alp- rose and the "gemsen-kraut" of Mont Blanc, at least with Alpine
Saxifrages which have now retreated a thousand feet up the mountain
side, and with the blue Snow-Gentian, and the Canadian Sedum, which
have all but vanished out of the British Isles. And what is it which tells
him that strange story? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock,
polished, remark, across the strata and against the grain; and furrowed
here and there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel scratches. It was
the crawling of a glacier which polished that rock-face; the stones
fallen from Snowdon peak into the half-liquid lake of ice above, which
ploughed those furrows. AEons and aeons ago, before the time when
Adam first
"Embraced his Eve in happy hour, And every bird in Eden burst In
carol, every bud in flower,"
those marks were there; the records of the "Age of ice;" slight, truly; to
be effaced by the next farmer who needs to build a wall; but
unmistakeable, boundless in significance, like Crusoe's one savage
footprint on the sea-shore; and the naturalist acknowledges the
finger-mark of God, and wonders, and worships.
Happy, especially, is the sportsman who is also a naturalist: for as he
roves in pursuit of his game, over hills or up the beds of streams where
no one but a sportsman ever thinks of going, he will be certain to see
things noteworthy, which the mere naturalist would never find, simply
because he could never guess that they were there to be found. I do not
speak merely of the rare birds which may be shot, the curious facts as
to the habits of fish which may be observed, great as these pleasures are.
I speak of the scenery, the weather, the geological formation of the
country, its vegetation, and the living habits of its denizens. A
sportsman, out in all weathers, and often dependent for success on his
knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," has opportunities for
becoming