lengthen out seawards, as the land broadens and extends, till the northern and western Highlands seem manacled in ice. Even the lower hill-tops exhibit an alpine vegetation, beautiful, though somewhat meagre ; while in the firths and bays, the remote ancestors of many of our existing shells that thrive in the higher latitudes, still mix, as at an earlier period, with shells whose living representatives are now to be sought on the coasts of northern Scandinavia and Greenland. Ages pass; the land rises slowly over the deep, terrace above terrace; the thermal line moves gradually to the north; the line of perpetual snow ascends beyond the mountain summits; the temperature increases; the ice disappears; the semi-arctic plants creep up the hill-sides, to be supplanted on the plains by the leafy denizens of happier climates; and at length, under skies such as now look down upon us, and on nearly the existing breadth of land, the human period begins. The half-naked hunter, armed with his hatchet or lance of stone, pursues the roe or the wild ox through woods that, though comparatively but of yesterday, already present appearances of a hoar antiquity; or, when the winter snows gather around his dwelling, does battle at its beleaguered threshold with the hungry wolf or the bear. The last great geologic change takes place; the coast line is suddenly elevated; and the country presents a new front to the sea. And on the widened platform, when yet other ages have come and gone, the historic period commences, and the light of a classical literature falls for the first time on the incidents of Scottish story, and on the bold features of Scottish character.

It is said that modern science is adverse to the exercise and development of the imaginative faculty. But is it really so? Are visions such as those in which we have been indulging less richly charged with that poetic pabulum on which fancy feeds and grows strong, than those ancient tales of enchantment and faery which beguiled of old, in

solitary homesteads, the long winter nights. Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth; and as there is a more general interest felt in new revelations of what God has wrought, than in exhibitions of what the humbler order of poets have half-borrowed, half-invented, the disappointed dreamers complain that the 'material laws' of science have pushed them from their place. As well might the Arab who prided himself upon the beauty of some white tent which he had reared in some green oasis of the desert, complain of the dull tools of Belzoni's labourers, when engaged in clearing from the sands the front of some august temple of the ancient time. It is not the tools, it might be well said to the complainer, that are competing with your neat little tent; it is the sublime edifice, hitherto covered up, which the tools are laying bare. Nor is it the material laws, we may, on the same principle, say to the poets of the querulous cast, that are overbearing your little inventions, and making them seem small; but those sublime works and wonderful actings of the Creator which they unveil, and bring into comparison with yours. But from His works and His actings have the masters of the lyre ever derived their choicest materials; and whenever a truly great poet arises, one that will add a profound intellect to a powerful imagination,—he will find science not his enemy, but an obsequious caterer and a devoted friend. He will find sermons in stones, and more of the suggestive and the sublime in a few broken scaurs of clay, a few fragmentary shells, and a few green reaches of the old coast line, than versifiers of the ordinary calibre in their once fresh gems and flowers,-in sublime ocean, the broad earth, or the blue firmament and all its stars.

The Poet Delta (Dr. Moir)-His Definition of Poetry-His Death-His Burialplace at Inveresk-Vision, Geological and Historical, of the Surrounding Country-What it is that imparts to Nature its Poetry-The Tertiary Formation in Scotland-In Geologic History all Ages contemporary-Amber the Resin of the Pinus succinifer-A Vegetable Production of the Middle Tertiary Ages -Its Properties and Uses-The Masses of Insects enclosed in it-The Structural Geology of Scotland-Its Trap Rock-The Scenery usually associated with the Trap Rock-How formed-The Cretaceous Period in Scotland-Its Productions-The Chalk Deposits-Death of Species dependent on Laws different from those which determine the Death of Individuals-The Two great Infinites.

THE members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh enjoyed the privilege last season of listening to one of the sweetest and tenderest of modern British poets eloquently descanting on the history of modern British poetry. Rarely had master established for himself a better claim to teach. And, regarding the elegant volume produced on that occasion, so exquisite in its taste and so generous in its criticisms, it may justly be said that perhaps its only, at all events its gravest defect, is the inevitable one that, in exhibiting all that during the bypast generation was most characteristic and best in the poesy of our country, it should have taken no cognizance of the poetry of Delta. Dr. Moir had just finished his course, but his volume had not yet appeared, when, urged by a friend, I perhaps too rashly consented to contribute two lectures to a course then delivering in the native town of the poet; and in one of these I expressed the conviction to which I gave utterance last season in this place, that there is no incompatibility between the pursuit of geologic science and a genial

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development of the poetic faculty. Dr. Moir had honoured my address with his presence; he had listened with apparent attention to a view very much opposed, as I was told after the breaking up of the meeting, to one which he himself had promulgated to the Institution only a few weeks before; and on the publication of his little volume he politely sent me a copy, accompanied by a kind note, in which he referred to the point apparently at issue between us, as involving rather a seeming than a real difference. 'Our antagonism respecting the relations of poetry and science,' he said, 'is, I doubt not, much more apparent than real, and arises simply from the opposite aspects in which we have regarded the subject.' I read his work with interest; and at first deemed the difference somewhat more than merely apparent. I found the lecturer speaking of 'staggering blows' inflicted on the poetry of the age by science in not a few formidably prosaic shapes,—in the shape, among the rest, of 'geological exposition;' and of 'rocks stratified by the geologists as satins are measured by mercers,' and, in consequence, no longer redolent of that emotion of the sublime which was wont to breathe forth of old from broken crags and giddy precipices. But his definition of poetry re-assured me, and set all right again. 'Poetry,' he said, 'may be defined to be objects or subjects seen through the mirror of imagination, and descanted on in harmonious language; and if so, it must be admitted that the very exactness of knowledge is a barrier to the ⚫laying on of that colouring by which facts can be invested with the illusive hues of poetry. Wherever light penetrates the obscure and illuminates the uncertain, we may rest assured that a demesne has been lost to the realms of imagination.' Now, if such be poetry, I said, and such the conditions favourable to its development, the poets need be in no degree jealous of the geologists. The stony science, with buried creations for its domains, and half an eternity

charged with its annals, possesses its realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which troops of fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts in the old fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite dark and uncertain enough for all the purposes of poesy for centuries to come.

Alas! only a few weeks after, amid hundreds of his sorrowing friends and townsmen, I followed the honoured remains of the poet to the grave; and heard, in that old picturesque burying-ground which commands on its green ridge the effluence of the Esk, the shovelled earth falling heavy on the coffin-lid. It was a lovely day of chequered shadow and sunshine; and the wide firth slept silently in the calm, with a dream-like spectrum of the heavens mirrored on its bosom. From the sadness of the present my thoughts let themselves out upon the past. I stood among the groves on a grassy mound which had been reared by the old Roman invader greatly more than a thousand years before; and I bethought me how, on visiting the place a few twelvemonths previous, for the first time, I had first of all sought out the burying-ground of the family of the deceased,-a spot endeared to every lover of poesy by those tenderest and sweetest of 'domestic verses' which show how truly, according to Cowper, 'the poet's lyre' had been 'the poet's heart;' and how I had next set myself to trace, as next in interest, the remains of that stern old people whose thirst of conquest and dominion had led them so far. And lo! like a dream remembered in a dream, as the crowd broke up and retired, the visions of that quiet day were again conjured up before me, but bearing now a felt reference to the respected dead, and accompanied by the conviction that, had we been destined to meet, and to compare at length our respective views, we should have found them essentially the same.

On that rising ground, so rich in historic associations, both Somerset and Cromwell had planted their cannon, and