NATURAL SCIENCE: 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress. 



No. 7. Vol. I. SEPTEMBER. 1892. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



The New Geology. 



THAT the main features in the physiography of the earth's surface 

 are not arranged haphazard, but in accordance with some 

 definite, if unknown, system, was recognised at an early stage in the 

 study of geography, and has become famiUar to fourth-form school- 

 boys through the maxim that the peninsulas all point to the south. 

 No serious effort, however, to formulate the law that governed the 

 evolution of the Continents, or even to systematise the leading facts of 

 the problem, was made till recently, with the exception of that 

 of Elie de Beaumont ; and this author's clock-face diagram of 

 the orientation of mountain ranges has long since been dropped from 

 geological text-books into the same category as the cycles and anti- 

 cycles with which the Neo-Ptolemists bolstered up the astronomical 

 system of their master. That Elie de Beaumont's speculations were 

 of no practical value is not surprising, since insufficient data had been 

 collected for the establishment of the laws that govern the denuda- 

 tion of highlands, the redeposition of sediments thus formed, and 

 especially of the re-elevation of those sediments into plateaux and 

 mountain chains. This has now been done and, as we have just 

 been reminded, stratigraphers have been reduced during the past few 

 years to filling in local details, though such work as Dr. Lawson's 

 Report on Rainy Lake has shown that even in this branch of geology 

 sensational results may still be achieved. The resting stage, how- 

 ever, has not been for long : a whole host of new and fascinating 

 problems has been raised by Professor Suess' " Antlitz der Erde," a 



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