THE HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AT OXFORD. 29 



abyss of time, and this brings us to a period, antecedent to 

 the deposition of any sediment whatever, and to a state of 

 Tuscany which Steno does not venture to represent by a 

 diagram. 



Steno did not regard the explanation, just set forth, as 

 restricted in its application to Tuscany ; but distinctly 

 affirmed, from his knowledge of other countries, that similar 

 reasoning would hold for every part of the world, where 

 stratified rocks occur. 



The first to logically demonstrate the true nature of 

 fossils ; the first to recognise the orderly sequence of de- 

 posits ; the first to perceive their occasional interruption by 

 those discordances, which we now term unconformities ; the 

 first to employ geological structure to arrive at geological 

 history and to inform us of the revolutions through which 

 our globe has passed ; said we not truly that this man was 

 the father and founder of our science ? 



In attempting to carry his explanations farther and 

 to push them deeper, Steno was less happy : his brave 

 imagination, successful so far, was now to suffer from the 

 restraints imposed upon it by a belief in the brevity of the 

 world's existence. The stage which immediately preceded 

 that represented by Steno's sixth diagram stood before his 

 mind as the beginning of created times, and all the sub- 

 sequent events of the earth's history had to be compressed 

 into a poor 6000 years ! Without a more generous allow- 

 ance of time no genius, however gifted, could hope to trace 

 the slowly pacing processes of nature ; and the fame of 

 Steno would undoubtedly have burned brighter had he 

 desisted from the attempt and refrained from an endeavour 

 to reconcile the irreconcilable. 



Contemporary with Steno was the celebrated Dr. Plot 

 of this University, whose great work on The Natural His- 

 tory of Oxfordshire appeared in 1677, eight years after the 

 publication of Steno's De Solido, etc. This was 220 years 

 ago, in the middle of the reign of Charles II., about fifty 

 years after the Fellows of Wadham College and their 

 friends met together to bring into existence the Royal 

 Society, for which the good king did so much by judi- 



