I found several other curious fossils in Mr. Longmuir's collection. Greatly more interesting, however, than any of the specimens which it contains, is the general fact, that it should be the collection of a Free Church minister, sedulously attentive to the proper duties of his office, but who has yet found time enough to render himself an accomplished geologist; and whose week-day lectures on the science attract crowds, who receive from them, in many instances, their first knowledge of the strange revolutions of which our globe has been the subject, blent with the teachings of a wholesome theology. The present age, above all that has gone before, is peculiarly the age of physical science; and of all the physical sciences, not excepting astronomy itself, geology, though it be a fact worthy of notice, that not one of our truly accomplished geologists is an infidel, is the science of which infidelity has most largely availed itself. And as the theologian 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; whereas the work itself, full of curious miscellaneous information, is eminently readable; and that the "Vestiges of Creation,"--a treatise as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights,"--bids fair, not from the amount of error which it contains, but from the amount of fresh and interestingly told truth with which the error is mingled, to live and do mischief when the various solidly-scientific replies which it has called forth are laid upon the shelf. Both the "Constitution" and the "Vestiges" had the advantage, so essential to the basilisk, of taking the first glance of the public on their respective subjects; whereas their confutators have been able to render them back but mere _return_ glances. The only efficiently counteractive mode of looking down the danger, in cases of this kind, is the mode adopted by Mr. Longmuir.