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LECTURE FOURTH.

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PREFACE

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THE AMERICAN EDITION.

THIS new volume, from the pen of HUGH MILLER, is a legacy wholly unlooked for by the American public. It was known to many of his admirers on this side of the Atlantic that he had been laboring for years on a work designed to be the magnum opus of his life -"THE GEOLOGY OF SCOTLAND." But his untimely death, it was supposed, had cut short his labors, and left the work in a state so fragmentary that his literary executors would not venture to publish it. The impression was a correct one, as related to the design of the author, in its magnitude and completeness. But the present

volume supplies, to general readers, what the proposed work would have done for the scientific world. It gives the geological history of Scotland

and, with Scotland, of the world

in language intelligible to all, and with an affluence of anecdote, and incident, and literary allusion, in which HUGH MILLER was without an equal among the scientific writers of our century. It gives precisely what

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