SYSTEMATIC DESCRIPTIVE 3EOLOGY. 521 



In the German, considering him as a geologist, the ideal ele.nent 

 oredominated. That Werner's powers of external discrimination 

 were extremely acute, we have seen in speaking of him as a mineralo- 

 gist ; and his talent and tendency for classifying were, in his mine- 

 ralogical studies, fully fed by an abundant store of observation ; but 

 when he came to apply this methodizing power to geology, the love 

 of system, so fostered, appears to have been too strong for the collec- 

 tion of facts he had to deal with. As we have already said, he pro- 

 mulgated, as representing the world, a scheme collected from a 

 province, and even too hastily gathered from that narrow field. Yet 

 his intense spirit of method in some measure compensated for other 

 deficiencies, and enabled him to give the character of a science to 

 what had been before a collection of miscellaneous phenomena. The 

 ardor of system-making produced a sort of fusion, which, however 

 superficial, served to bind together the mass of incoherent and mixed 

 materials, and thus to form, though by strange and anomalous means, 

 a structure of no small strength and durability, like the ancient vitri- 

 fied structures which we find in some of our mountain regions. 



Of a very different temper and character was William Smith. No 

 literary cultivation of his youth awoke in him the speculative love of 

 symmetry and system ; but a singular clearness and precision of the 

 classifying power, which he possessed as a native talent, was exercised 

 and developed by exactly those geological facts among which his 

 philosophical task lay. Some of the advances which he made, had, 

 as we have seen, been at least entered upon by others who preceded 

 him : but of all this he was ignorant; and, perhaps, went on more 

 steadily and eagerly to work out his own ideas, from the persuasion 

 that they were entirely his own. At a later period of his life, he him- 

 self published an account of the views which had animated him in his 

 earlier progress. In this account 33 he dates his attempts to discrimi- 

 nate and connect strata from the year 1790, at which time he was 

 twenty years old. In 1792, he "had considered how he could best 

 represent the order of superposition continuity of course and 

 general eastern declination of the strata." Soon after, doubts which 

 had arisen were removed by the " discovery of a mode of identifying 

 the strata by the organized fossils respectively imbedded therein." 

 And " thus stored with ideas," as he expresses himself, he began to 

 Communicate them to his friends. In all this, we see great vividness 



ss Phil. Jfay. 1833, vol. i. p. 38. 



