and Subterranean Water Storage. 63 



the remains of its former inhabitants. The whole being of the 

 earth, as anything more than an inert mass of inorganic matter, is 

 thus bound up in these varieties of the mechanical state of matter. 

 The varieties themselves result from the mode in which force 

 acts on matter, developed in one case as gravitation, in another 

 as heat, then again exhibited in light, or in the various forms of 

 electric and chemical force, and finally culminating in life itself. 

 The various forms of force resulting in organisation produce this 

 result apparently by means analogous to some of those by which 

 inorganic matter is influenced. 



]\Iany important conclusions follow from this view of matter 

 and force. Geologically it excludes all possibility of connecting 

 the earth as it is with an earth in which matter should be 

 exclusively either gaseous, or liquid, or solid, and not an admix- 

 ture of the three. The earth may no doubt at some former 

 time have existed in a vaporous or liquid state, like a comet, 

 or like some of its fellow planets, or it may once have been 

 solid, resembling, perhaps, the moon, or some other bodies in 

 our system. 



Who, indeed, can say what might not have happened with 

 regard to the earth that can happen to matter ? But of all this 

 there is not one particle of evidence in the condition of the 

 earth's outer crust. We may therefore dismiss all such theories, 

 for no rock that was ever yet seen by man has needed for its 

 formation any other conditions than those that exist at present ; 

 and we have no analogy to show that any one of these rocks 

 could have been formed without air, water, and earth, associated 

 and derived just as rocks* now are, and mutually dependent. 



This is by no means a matter of mere theory. So much has 

 been said and written of igneous rocks and a steam atmosphere, 

 so imaginative are many expressions of geologists in speaking of 

 the earth's origin, that the general reader and even the geological 

 student may be excused for supposing that there is some evidence 

 to support them. There is absolutely none, nor can we carrv 

 back the history of the world by means of observation and 

 investigation to any period when the sun did not shine, when the 

 air did not float over earth and ocean, when the waves, and 

 tides, and currents did not keep the waters of the ocean in per- 

 petual movement, and dash them against the land, and when the 

 water was not lifted into the air, conveyed by it to the land, con- 

 densed and deposited there, and either carried off" by rivers, 

 absorbed into the earth, or re-absorbed into the atmosphere by 

 evaporation. 



* The term rock is used here and throughout this memoir in its technical 

 geological sense, and is intended to include all mineral masses. Thus chalk and 

 even incoherent sand or clay are rocks as much as hard limestones and sandstones. 



