306 



THE FARMER*S MAGAZINE. 



5,274,080 bushels ; so that the quantity of this grain 

 consumed in the manufacture of the distilled spirits 

 sold in Cincinnati was 1,145,430 bushels greater than 

 the average annual shipment to Europe. 



The consumption of spirituous liquors is perhaps 

 larger than it ought to be in many localities, such as 



Scotland, Australia, California, Poland, &:C. ; but we 

 believe this evil will in due time work its own cure. 

 As active employment, education, and amusements 

 progress, men will resort less to the bottle as a stimu- 

 lant ; and, as in the United Kingdom, the ratio of con- 

 sumption will decline. 



LECTURE ON GEOLOGY, 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF THAT SCIENCE 



TO AGRICULTURE. 



Delivered at the Agricultural College, Kennington, by S. J. Mackie, F.G.S., F.S.A., &c. ; 



AND printed at THE DESIRE OF THE PRINCIPAL, J. C. NeSBIT, ESO., F.G.S., F.C.S. 



Science not now to be disregarded in any department of industry. 

 Relics and organic remains. Doctrines of central heat and 

 gradual refrigeration of our planet. Elevation of land. Age 

 of mountains. Splieroidal form of globe. Strata and sea- 

 shores. Fossil and recent shells. Deposits — freshwater, terres- 

 trial, and marine. Inclined and vertical strati. Speculative, 

 theoretical, and practical geology. Explanation of ordinary 

 technical terms proposed. Practical utility of geology. 



Every department of industry or commerce, in England at 

 least, has been developed into a science, and scarcely any avail- 

 able sources of information or improvement have been neglected 

 in advancing the progress of those arts and manufactures which 

 have placed our country in the foremost rank of nations, and 

 have made our merchants and our manufacturers like the 

 princes of old. 



Most of us can recollect the former school of antiquaries — 

 harmless old gentlemen, who collected all kinds of oddities, and 

 carefully treasured them as curiosities ; men who would take 

 to the fraction of an inch the width of a church window or the 

 height of a doorway ; who would count every nail in an old 

 shoe, and exhibit with delight a spur of King James's, or a bit 

 of Oliver Cromwell's coat tail ; but who never learned one fact 

 from all the treasures they accumulated, nor advanced by a 

 single new idea the intelligence of their race. And yet out 

 of the things that to these men were mere idle vanities, the 

 Bkilfulness of modern induction has developed such interesting 

 knowledge, and from tiie graves, edifices, and relics of the 

 ancient nations of the world, has furnished such valuable les- 

 sons of history, as have made archrcology one of the most 

 interesting and attractive of the modern sciences. 



But antiquities are associated with the feelings and passions 

 of the human race ; they retain the traces of those who have 

 gone before us the way of all flesh ; there is a touch of some- 

 thing as it were almost of humanity about them. The brooch 

 of the Anglo-Saxon, or the fibula of the Roman, speaks, after 

 no matter how many ages, to the mind like the trinkets of 

 some departed friend ; and though we knew not the wearers, 

 yet we link intuitively as it were, in their contemplation, many 

 of the best sympathies of our nature. Relics always were the 

 treasured memeatos of the past. Not so the curiosities of the 

 soil : shells were broken out of the rocks centuries ago, when 

 the mighty pyramids were reared ; and the mineralized teeth 

 of fishes in more recent times have been regarded with super- 

 atition or swallowed as medicines. There is no association, at 

 first sight, between the relic* of former creations and the syra- 



pathiea or wants of our race. Iron and the metals were re- 

 quired in peace and in war, and of their working and their 

 manufacture we obtain evidences from very early periods. 

 Stone for building also succeeded with the advances of national 

 civilization. But geology, though in some branches practically 

 existent within certain bounds, had not attained the rank of a 

 science at the dawn of the present memorable century. Earnest 

 and truth-seeking indeed have been those master-minds whose 

 labours have developed this yet imperfect, but marvellous and 

 noble science. From the shells and bones, and scales and 

 leaves, mineralized in the solid stone, they have pourtrayed the 

 creations of the past ; from the clays, and sands, and lime- 

 stones, they have read grand passages in the history of former 

 continents, and have mapped down seas and oceans that laved 

 the shores of lands no monarch owned, or human being trod ; 

 from the granites, traps, and basalts, they have told the ages of 

 mountains, and have gained an insight into the mysterious 

 powers of the volcano and earthquake, and they have given an 

 interest of no ordinary character to the ages that were, and out 

 of seeming insignificance and chaos have developed scenes of 

 exquisite beauty and order. No wonder that the fossil relics 

 of ante-humau creations should be so eagerly sought after by 

 so many of the votaries of this attractive study. Doubtless 

 they are the finer types, in which the poetry of the science is 

 printed ;"_ but there is creeping into the fashion of collecting 

 fossils rather too much of the spirit of the old antiquaries, and 

 specimens are too often regarded in the light of something 

 new or rare, something that nobody else has — in fact, as curi- 

 osities, rather than as something every one is sure to find if 

 they look — as something usefid and instructive — something 

 that is an evidence of what was, and may be of service to 

 what is. 



There are still numbers, notwithstanding the progress geology 

 has made, who are ignorant of its first principles ; and the 

 question is often asked, by those even who have some slight 

 acquaintance with its rudiments, Of what good is it ? We have 

 still much to do in promoting the knowledge of its principles, 

 and what is still more to the purpose, their practical application. 

 The anomalous and somewhat equivocal position which this 

 science is through prejudice made to hold, among professional 

 men as well as among the mass, in this respect, has undoubtedly 

 been induced by the too-absorbing attention given to the study 

 of organic remains ; and indeed a great proportion of so-called 

 geologists would be with more propriety called amateur pahcoa- 

 tologists, We do not, however, condemn palasontolog}', while 

 we hold distinctly and prominently that its true position is 



