now. We cannot tell when the water was separated from the atmosphere, or how long the atmosphere retained in itself the elemental constituents of water and of earth. The mathematician and geologist have nothing to do with the subject before this event took place; there is nothing visible or tangible, no data for a single figure. The moment dry land is created the physical geographer begins his labors. They are not difficult; he knows the uncertain forces that work under cosmical laws on forever changing materials; by knowing the results at present, he can tell those of the past. Far be it from us to suggest infallible action; we can but give a faint outline of the whole, but we give nothing that cannot be verified by the law and its actions at the present moment. The geographer looks through time upon the face of the first dry land; he sees the water-sheds giving out their little trickles all running down the slopes, all wearing away something in their course, all depositing some atoms on their way, and all carrying on to their little estuaries or deltas a constant succession of minute atoms. He sees the deltas constantly extending by the addition of atoms, and constantly rising in consequence of the retiring of the waters. He sees constant additions to the dry land made by the water in one place, and constant abstractions in another; he knows that every atom taken from the water-bed makes that bed deeper, and every atom taken from dry land helps eventually to extend its shores. Under these actions he comprehends that the dry land must have gone on growing, and that the undulating ocean bed must have grown deeper where its currents ran, and shallower where they did not; he traces the gradual growth of these shallow places, not by any forcible elevation of the mass, but by the slow departure of the water, by the sediments left upon them, by the eventual growth of vegetation, by the creation of life, by the elemental forces forever returning to their dusts, in some regions or another, to the extending deltas and the growing dry land. He looks upon the mud and sand-banks of to-day and sees the same forces at work under the same laws; he knows that these forces acted under the same laws at the beginning, and he knows that they acted on the materials then available as they act on the materials of to-day. He marks through legends, history, and his own experience the denudations and the additions of the seashores; he finds that in thousands of years the general contour of the dry land has remained the same; he finds that localities have been added to and taken away. In these subtractions he sees the fossil remains of prehistoric organic structure torn from their resting-places in the calcareous rocks, he handles the flint nodule formed from the silicious dusts of diatoms and foraminifera, and finds the same dusts in course of deposit in the deepest parts of the ocean, telling him, not only that these organisms have continued their races for millions of years, but that they have, for all those ages, left their dusts to subside upon the ocean bed, certain evidence that the site on which we find the stratified calcareous rocks, with their lines of flint nodules, was once the ocean bed. He may look on the sand collections now on our surf-beaten shores, on the wind-drifts of the great deserts, and on the sanddunes in many regions; he does not know when they began to grow, but he sees on mountain sides sandstone rocks several hundred feet in thickness, many miles in length and breadth. He knows that they were formed and gathered by the same forces. that now occupy hundreds of years in adding a few inches to the shores, and he is lost in thinking of the vast amount of silicious matter broken up, triturated into sand, and deposited by the water on its bed, and that bed hundreds of feet above his head. He finds the hard silicious rock in stratified form on the tops of our highest mountains, in their interior, and in the deepest seas, where it still wears away and contributes atoms for deposit in other places. He is lost in the time occupied by the deepening of the sea, by the vastness of the deposits formed by it, far above its present surface level, and by the extent of deposit now in progress in its depths. The geographer knows that every river is always bringing something to its estuary, yet its growth of dry land is very slow; he measures it, but he cannot tell by that measurement when the estuary of the Nile was four thousand miles from its present site. He may trace the Mississippi from its present watery delta back to its tributaries in the Rocky Mountains, but it does not tell him when these, now great, waters trickled as little rills from the first dry land of those regions. He looks upon the water-worn chasms of the Himalayas and the Alps, on the vast gorges of great rivers; he cannot say when those rivers began to run, or how long it took them to wear away the hard obstruction to their course, any easier than Sir Charles Lyell could tell the age of the Niagara Gorge. He may see the vast structure of the coral insect [sic] now growing over thousands of miles in the Red Sea, but he does not know when those structures were commenced. He sees the stu pendous mass of the dolomite mountains: he knows that these were all lodged as sedimental matter where they now stand by the same water forces which had previously built up the silicious Alps; that all the materials of which they are formed were brought atom by atom, just as atoms are lodged on our sea-coasts to-day, by the waters, which were then deeper than the mountains are high, from places on the sea-bed which were shallower, places that were washed away, and deepened by the very force that broke up the coral banks, carried them away, and lodged them where they are. He can form no idea where or when the insects lived that gathered all this calcareous matter from their water, how long it occupied them in constructing their palaces, how long they existed, when they were pulled to pieces, how long they were triturated by current and by wave, or when the atoms were permitted to become deposits. He may look on the calcareous matter of the Jura Mountains and know that they are formed from bones and shells of a fauna that once lived on land or in the water; he knows that these masses were lodged in water as deep as the mountains are high, in minute fragments, with an occasional entire shell or an unbroken bone, but he knows nothing of the land or water in or on which the fauna lived. He cannot count the time occupied in the formation of these mountains, or tell for how many ages the fauna lived that left their dusts to form them. Wherever the physical geographer turns he is lost in the lapse of ages. The waters have left their old beds, the land has acquired new dimensions. All dry lands have their high places, from which their water-sheds convey their atoms away; every atom helps to extend dry land; the water-sheds are the agents for the work, and the great waters are the agents for the separation of matter, and for its deposit in its proper place. All this is done now under certain laws by the cosmical agents, air and water. No one knows better than the physical geographer the truth of the words used by the writer in the Quarterly Review: "In all the operations of nature . . . God worked by law, . . . by the process of slow development, by means beautifully simple, involving no violence, no haste, yet irresistible." No one sees more clearly the error, ascribed to Professor P. G. Tait, in The Mail, 8th January, 1877: "The present state of things has not been evolved through infinite past time by the agency of laws now at work, but must have had a distinct beginning." "When was it, and what was it?" It is the slow, the certain, the beautiful, and the unchanging process of cosmical law, which gives the character of infinite to the universe. Finite man has not as yet read the pages of the law, and cannot therefore calculate the age of this earth. He has tried over and over again to do so, but Professor Tait is not so near to the truth as Solomon was; other "guesses" (Quarterly) may be nearer, but the men who guess are at present without chart, compass, or sounding-line on the fathomless and boundless ocean of eternity. The Geographical Magazine. - EVOLUTION IN THE NETHERLANDS: TESTIMONIAL TO MR. DARWIN.1 WE have great pleasure in printing the following correspond ence: UTRECHT, February 20, 1877. TO THE EDITOR OF NATURE, -On the sixty-ninth birthday of your great countryman, Mr. Charles Darwin, an album with two hundred and seventeen photographs of his admirers in the Netherlands, among whom are eighty-one doctors and twentyone university professors, was presented to him. To the album was joined a letter, of which you will find a copy here inclosed, with the answer of Mr. Darwin. I suppose you will like to give to both letters a place in your very estimable journal, and therefore I have the honor to forward them to you. P. HARTING, SIR,- In the early part of the present century there resided in Amsterdam a physician, Dr. J. E. Doornik, who, in 1816, took his departure for Java, and passed the remainder of his life for the greater part in India. His name, though little known elsewhere than in the Netherlands, yet well deserves to be held in remembrance, since he occupies an honorable place among the pioneers of the theory of development. Among his numerous publications on natural philosophy, with a view to this, are worthy of mention his "Wijsgeerig-natuurkundig onderzoek aan gaande den vorspronkelijken mensch en de vorspronkelijke stammen van deszelfs geslacht" (Philosophic Researches concerning Original Man and the Origin of his Species), and his treatise, 1 From Nature, London. "Over het begrip van levenskracht uit een geologisch oogpunt beschouwd" (On the Idea of Vitality considered from a Geological Point of View). The first appeared in 1808; the latter, though written about the same time, was published in 1816, together with other papers more or less similar in tendency, under the title of "Wijsgeerig-natuurkundige verhandelingen " (Treatises on the Philosophy of Natural History). In these publications we recognize Doornik as a decided advocate of the theory that the various modifications in which life was revealed in consecutive times originated each from the other. He already occupies the point of vantage on which, shortly afterwards, Lamarck, with reference to the animal kingdom, and, in his wake, Prévost and Lyell, with respect to the geological history of our globe, have taken their stand. Yet the seeds scattered by Dr. Doornik did not take root in fertile soil. It is true that a Groningen professor, G. Bakker, combated at great length some of his arguments regarding the origin of man; they attracted but little public attention, and soon passed into oblivion. A generation had passed away ere the theory of evolution began to attract more attention in the Netherlands. The impulse was given by the appearance of the well-known work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, of which a Dutch translation was published in 1849 by Dr. T. H. van den Broek, professor of chemistry at the military medical college in Utrecht, with an introductory preface by the celebrated chemist, Prof. G. T. Mulder, as well known in England as elsewhere. This work excited a lively controversy, but its opponents were more numerous than its partisans. Remarkably enough, it found more favor with the general public, and especially with some theologians of liberal principles, than with the representatives of the natural sciences. The majority of zoologists and botanists of any celebrity in the Netherlands looked upon the writer's opinions as a chimera, and speculated on the weaker points rather than on the merits of the work. Notwithstanding, this presented no obstacle to a comparative success, and in 1854 even a third edition of the translation was published, enriched by the translator with numerous annotations. Among the few Dutch savants to recognize the light which the theory of development spreads over creation must be mentioned two Utrecht professors, namely, F. C. Donders and P. Harting. The former, in his inaugural address pronounced in 1848, “De |