The Old Red Sandstone Author:Hugh Miller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Lamarck's Theory of Progression illustrated. Class of Facts which give Color to it. The Credulity of Unhelief. M. Maillet and his Fish-hirds... more ». Gradation not Progress. Geological Argumeat. The Preseat incomplete without the Past. Iutermediate Links of Creation. Organisms of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. The Pterichthys. Its first Discovery. Mr. Murchison's Decision regarding it. Confirmed hy that of Agassiz. Deseription. The several Varieties of the Fossil yet discovered. Evidence of Violeat Death in the Attitndes in which they are found. The Coccosteus of the Lower Old Red. Description. Gradations from Crustacea to Fishes. Hahits of the Coccosteus. Scarcely any Conception too extravagaat for Nature to realize. Mr. Lyell's brilliant and popular work, The Principles of Geology, must have introduced to the knowledge of most of my readers the strange theories of Lamarck. The ingenious foreigner, oa the strength of a few striking facts, which prove that, to a certain extent, the instincts of species may be improved and heightened, and their forms changed from a lower to a higher degree of adaptation to their circumstances, has concluded that there is a natural progress from the inferior orders of being towards the superior ; and that the offspring of creatures low in the scale in the present time, may hold a much higher place in it, and belong to different and nobler species, a few thousand years hence. The descendants of the ourang-outang, for instance, may be employed in some future age in writing treatises on Geology, in which they shall have to describe the remains of the quadrumana as belonging to an extinct order. Lamarck himself, when bearing home in triumph with him the skeleton of some hugesalamander or crocodile of the L...« less