NATURAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE, 1700-1800 317 



was made. At that time Lazzaro Moro put forward the view that 

 the rocks must have been in process of formation when fossils were 

 included in them, and that the earth's crust evidently consists of 

 strata, superimposed one upon another. He also reasoned from 

 the character of the included fossils, back to the character of the 

 rocks containing them, arguing that some must have been 

 laid down in fresh water, others in salt water, and hence some in 

 rivers or lakes, and some in the sea. 



In 1765 the first school of mines of which we have record was 

 established at Freiberg, in Saxony, and here appeared in 1775 a 

 student of the natural history of minerals and of the earth, viz. 

 Abraham Werner, son of an Inspector of Mines at Freiberg, and 

 eventually a popular teacher there of mining and geology. Wer- 

 ner's name is associated with a special school the Neptunists 

 who, following him, held that the crust of the earth had been 

 laid down in water. In opposition, another school the Vul- 

 canists arose, holding that it has come rather by fire, volcanoes, 

 and the like. 



Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Dr. Hutton of 

 Edinburgh, and William Smith, an English surveyor, made patient, 

 accurate, and detailed studies of fossils and their distribution, and 

 of erosion and other work of water, over a considerable area, and 

 published, the former a Theory of the Earth (1788), the latter a 

 geological map of England (1815). These formed a solid basis 

 for that epoch-making work by Lyell, in 1830, to which we shall 

 refer hereafter. Hutton deserves to be especially remembered 

 with honor for his insistence that the best interpreter of the past 

 is the present ; that if we would know how rocks were formed ages 

 ago, we have only to observe how they are being formed today. 

 This simple doctrine of " unif ormitarianism " was not only an 

 inspiration to Lyell, but, largely through Lyell, prepared the way 

 for Darwinism and other evolutionary ideas requiring tune with 

 slow change, in the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PROGRESS IN BOTANY, ZOOLOGY, ETC. 

 The great world of plant and animal life, even at the middle of 

 the eighteenth century, was still almost unexplored and unclas- 



