The Foot-prints of the Creator

Synopsis

There are chapters in this little volume which will, I am afraid, be deemed too prolix by the general reader, and which yet the geologist would like less were there any portion of them away. They refer chiefly to organisms not hitherto figured nor described, and must owe their modicum of value to that very minuteness of detail which, by critics of the merely literary type, unacquainted with fossils, and not greatly interested in them, may be regarded as a formidable defect, suited to overlay the general subject of the work. Perhaps the best mode of compromising the matter may be to intimate, as if by beacon, at the outset, the more repulsive chapters; somewhat in the way that the servants of the Humane Society indicate to the skater who frequents in winter the lakes in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, those parts of the ice on which he might be in danger of losing himself.

Similar Bookshelves