572 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY. 



by which, its motions and developernents are regulated, is to expect 

 to understand thoroughly the laws of motion, of developernent, and 

 of providence ; it is to expect that we may ascend from geology and 

 astronomy to the creative and legislative centre, from which pro- 

 ceeded earth and stars ; and then descend again into the moral and 

 spiritual world, because its source and centre are the same as those of 

 the material creation. It is to say that reason, whether finite or infi- 

 nite, must be consistent with itself; and that, therefore, the finite 'must 

 be able to comprehend the infinite, to travel from any one province of 

 ihe moral and material universe to any other, to trace their bearing, 

 and to connect their boundaries. 



One of the advantages of the study of the history and nature of 

 science in which we are now engaged is, that it warns us of the hope- 

 less and presumptuous character of such attempts to understand the 

 government of the world by the aid of science, without throwing any 

 discredit upon the reality of our knowledge ; that while it shows how 

 solid and certain each science is, so long as it refers its own facts to its 

 own ideas, it confines each science within its own limits, and condemns 

 it as empty and helpless, when it pronounces upon those subjects which 

 are extraneous to it. The error of persons who should seek a geologi- 

 cal narrative in theological records, would be rather in the search itself 

 than in their interpretation of what they might find ; and in like man- 

 ner the error of those who would conclude against a supernatural 

 beginning, or a providential direction of the world, upon geological or 

 physiological reasonings, would be, that they had expected those 

 sciences alone to place the origin or the government of the world in its 

 proper light. 



Though these observations apply generally to all the palastiological 

 sciences, they may be permitted here, because they have an especial 

 bearing upon some of the difficulties which have embarrassed the pro- 

 gress of geological speculation ; and though such difficulties are, I 

 trust, nearly gone by, it is important for us to see them in their true 

 bearing. 



From what has been said, it follows that geology and astronomy are, 

 of themselves, incapable of giving us any distinct and satisfactory 

 account of the origin of the universe, or of its parts. We need not 

 wonder, then, at any particular instance of this incapacity ; as, for 

 example, that of which we have been speaking, the impossibility of 

 accounting by any natural means for the production of all the succes- 

 sive tribes of plants and animals which have peopled the world in the 



