46 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



ject. For this alone we owe him a debt of deep gratitude, 

 but our obligations do not cease here, he introduced to the 

 eyes of an astonished world a strange procession of extinct 

 forms of life, with whom he seemed on most familiar terms ; 

 parodising a line from Juvenal he exclaimed, " Quicquid 

 agunt ' Sauri,' votum timor ira voluptas gaudia discursus 

 nostri est farrago Libelli " and then proceeded to describe 

 " the details of their political and domestic economy ". 



In his Bridgewater Treatise we may still read with 

 interest and profit his vivid account of the Icthyosaurs, 

 Plesiosaurs, Megalosaurus, and Pterodactyles, and other 

 monsters of the mighty past. This work was written sixty 

 years ago, and yet such was the sagacity of the author in 

 selecting only those facts which were well ascertained and 

 sure, that it may be put into the hands of the youngest 

 and most innocent of geologists, without fear of infecting 

 his mind with forgotten error. 



Nor must we here overlook his success in informing and 

 convincing the world of science of the fact that in times 

 immediately antecedent to the glacial period, our country 

 and Europe generally was the home of a vast number of 

 animals no longer found in it, some of them altogether 

 extinct, such as the mammoth, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, 

 cave hysena, bears and tigers, and the arctic glutton. 



Of Buckland's pupils, the greatest was Lyell, whose 

 fame indeed overshadows his master's. Hutton had pro- 

 pounded the theory of the efficacy of modern causes, 

 Playfair had illustrated it, and Lyell spent his life in de- 

 fending and elaborating it. In consequence of his success 

 in this work, it is far more often associated with Lyell's 

 name, who was its foster parent, than with Hutton's w T ho 

 was its true originator. 



We have already alluded to this doctrine. It is that the 

 only method by which an explanation of the past can be 

 obtained is by a careful study of the processes of the 

 present, - or, as it is often epigrammatically expressed, 

 " Geology finds in the processes of the present a key to 

 unlock the past". It must be confessed at the outset that 

 it is difficult to see where else she would find it ; not in the 



