^ Professor Forbes on the Geology of Auvergne. 



should be the last to complain, were these efforts always well 

 directed ; but even^the rigid canons of the Baconian school admit 

 of discrimination in the search of truth, a faculty nearly (though 

 not quite) as essential in the observer as in the experimentaHst, 

 and without which he cannot have the slightest clew to separate 

 what is important from what is trivial, — what is adapted for im- 

 mediate application to the ends of science, from what it would be 

 soon enough to detail a century hence,r — without which the re- 

 sults of his labour, however accurate, may be redundant, and his 

 painfully collected cabinet, as useless to science as if its elements 

 had taken their natural course to the chisel or the limekiln. 



The geologist has confined himself too much to the accumu- 

 lation of undigested facts. He has considered his science too 

 much as a mere department of natural history, without refer- 

 ence to the far more important questions of cause producing 

 change, which brings it under the immediate dominion of natu- 

 ral philosophy. For although we cannot for a moment overlook 

 the bold and admirable speculations of Hutton, and the re- 

 searches consequent upon them conducted in the best spirit of 

 inductive science by Playfair and Hall, — ^it must be admit- 

 ted that this chapter of scientific history is in a great measure 

 insulated from that of the age, and that the methods and results 

 of these observers have scarcely been quoted, even by those who 

 have adopted their conclusions, without materially enlarging their 

 premises. 



This neglect of the great ends of geology, may in some mea- 

 sure be ascribed to a discovery which ought to have been one 

 of the principal sources of their advancement. The relations of 

 the organized fossils found in the strata to the order of superpo- 

 sition of these strata, was calculated to afford an indication of 

 the highest value for the classification of the groups of rocks 

 where mineralogical characters were awanting, and for the iden- 

 tification of insulated deposits. 



We ought not, perhaps, to be astonished that so pregnant a 

 discovery was carried in its consequences rather to excess. But 

 we could not have been prepared for the almost total devotion 

 with which geologists have surrendered themselves to Palaeon- 

 tology, — B. devotion which has produced a smile even on the 

 part of zoologists themselves, when they found the good-natured 



