PRELUDE TO DESCRIPTIVE GEOLOGY. 509 



it the same time a professorship of the study of geology. The "Wood 

 wardian Museum still subsists, a monument of the sagacity with which 

 its author so early saw the importance of such a collection. 



Collections and descriptions of fossils, including in the term speci- 

 mens of minerals of all kinds, as well as organic remains, were fre- 

 quently made, and especially in places where mining was cultivated ; 

 but under such circumstances, they scarcely tended at all to that 

 general and complete knowledge of the earth of which we are now 

 tracing the progress. 



In more modern times, collections may be said to be the most 

 important books of the geologist, at least next to the strata themselves. 

 The identifications and arrangements of our best geologists, the 

 immense studies of fossil anatomy by Cuvier and others, have been 

 conducted mainly by means of collections of specimens. They are 

 more important in this study than in botany, because specimens which 

 contain important geological information are both more rare and more 

 permanent. Plants, though each individual is perishable, perpetuate 

 and diffuse their kind ; while the organic impression on a stone, if' lost, 

 may never occur in a second instance ; but, on the other handy if it 

 be preserved in the museum, the individual is almost as permanent in 

 this case, as the species in the other. 



I shall proceed to notice another mode in which such information 

 was conveyed. 



i/ 



Sect. 3. First Construction of Geological Maps. 



DR. LISTER, a learned physician, sent to the Royal Society, in 1683, a 

 proposal for maps of soils or minerals ; in which he suggested that in 

 the map of England, for example, each soil and its boundaries might 

 be distinguished by color, or in some other way. Such a mode of ex- 

 pressing and connecting our knowledge of the materials of the earth 

 was, perhaps, obvious, when the mass of knowledge became conside- 

 rable. In 1720, Fontenelle, in his observations on a paper of De Reau- 

 mur's, which contained an account of a deposit of fossil-shells in Tou- 

 raine, says, that in order to reason on such cases, " we must have a 

 kind of geographical charts, constructed according to the collection 

 of shells found in the earth." But he justly adds, " What a quantity 

 of observations, and what time would it not require to form such 

 maps !" 



The execution of such projects required, not merely great labor, bul 



