278 Proceedings of the British Association for 1850. 



life of the earth, that man derives the materials of civiliza- 

 tion — ^his coal, his iron, and his gold. And deeper still, as 

 geologists have proved — and none with more power than the 

 geologists around me — we find in the bosom of the earth, 

 written on blocks of marble — the history of primaeval times, 

 of worlds of life created, and worlds of life destroyed. We 

 find there — in hieroglyphics as intelligible as those which 

 Major Rawlinson has deciphered on the slabs of Nineveh, 

 the remains of forests which waved in luxuriance over its 

 plains ; the very bones of huge reptiles that took sheJter 

 under their foliage, and of gigantic quadrupeds that trod 

 uncontrolled its plains — the lawgivers and the executioners 

 of that mysterious community with which it pleased the Al- 

 mighty to people his infant world. But though man is but a 

 recent occupant of the earth — an upstart in the vast chrono- 

 logy of animal life, his interest in the Paradise so carefully 

 prepared for him is not the less exciting and profound. For 

 him it was made ; he was to be the lord of the new creation, 

 and to him it especially belongs to investigate the wonders 

 it displays, and to learn the lesson which it reads. But 

 while our interests are thus closely connected with the sur- 

 face, and the interior of the earth, interests of a higher kind 

 are associated with it as a body of the solar system to which 

 we belong. The object of geology is to unfold the history 

 and explain the structure of a planet : and that history and 

 that structure may, within certain limits, be the history 

 and the structure of all the other planets of the system — 

 perhaps of all the other planets of the universe. The laws 

 of matter must be the same, wherever matter is found. The 

 heat which warms our globe, radiates upon the most distant 

 of the planets ; and the light which twinkles in the remotest 

 star, is in its physical, and doubtless in its chemical, proper- 

 ties, the same that cheers and enlivens our own system ; and 

 if men of ordinary capacity possessed that knowledge which 

 is within their reach, and had that faith in science which 

 its truths inspire, they would see in every planet around 

 them, and in every star above them, the home of immortal 

 natures — of beings that suffer and of beings that rejoice — of 

 souls that are saved and of souls that are lost. Geology is, 

 therefore, the first chapter of astronomy. It describes that por- 



