“There is no branch of science so closely associated with our immediate wants 
and enjoyments as that of Geology. In our daily walks we tread with heedless 
step upon the apparently uninteresting objects of which it treats; but could we 
rightly interrogate the rounded pebble in our path, it would tell us of the con- 
vulsions by which it was wrenched from its parent rock, and of the floods by which 
it was abraded and_ placed beneath our feet. In our visit to the picturesque 
and the sublime, we come into still closer proximity to geological truths In the 
precipices which defend our rock-girt Isle, and flank our mountain glens, and in 
the shapeless, fragments at their base which the lichen colours and round which 
the ivy twines, we see the remnants of uplifted and shattered strata which once 
peacefully reposed at the bottom of the ocean. 
“ But it is not merely among the scenes of external nature that forces, now 
subdued, are presented to our minds. Our temples and our dwellings are formed 
from the rocks of a primeval age—bearing the ripple marks of a Pre-Adamite 
ocean,—ground by the friction of the once travelling boulder, and embosoming 
the relics of ancient life, with the plants which sustained it. Our houses are 
ornamented with variegated limestones, the indurated tombs of molluscous life, 
and our apartments heated with the carbon of primeval forests and hghted with 
the gaseous element which it confines. 
“When the geologist begins his survey of the globe, he finds its solid covering 
composed of rocks and beds of all shapes and kinds, lying at every possible angle, 
and occupying every possible position. Here the granite rises in lofty peaks, or is 
scattered in rounded boulders. There the basait throws its once liquid current 
over beds of sandstone, or sustains them upon its flanks. Here the strata, once at 
the bottom of the sea, rest in undisturbed tranquillity—the more recent deposits 
from a tranquil ocean. There they bristle up with their rugged margin, display- 
ing, in serrated outline, the fractured edges of ancient and of recent beds. Hvyery- 
where, indeed, what was deep is brought into visible relation with what was super- 
ficial—what is old with what is new—what preceded life with what followed it. 
‘How these rocks came into their present place it is the business of the geo- 
logist to determine—to compute their relative ages—to fix the position which 
they originally occupied—to study the forces by which they were upheaved—and 
the remains of organic life which they entomb. Studies like these possess a home 
interest for reflecting and sympathizing man. Life claims kindred with what once 
lived. It owns the same relation between itself and that which is yet to breathe ; 
and if on the tombs of our fathers is inscribed the law under which we are indivi- 
dually to join them, we read with no less distinctness among the cemeteries of 
primeval death that more general enactment under which the races of man, and 
the tributary creation which obeys him, shall take their place in the coming catas- 
trophe, and reappear to future pilgrims—memorials of the age of genius—the 
cycle of intellectual and immortal generations.” 
Str Davin Brewster. 
