M, Blainville on Ichthyolites. 109. 
are connected mainly with. the last revolutions of the globe ;—uni- 
versally with the later ones, And yet among these later, we must 
except the latest of all, which are the whole of the two classes of 
rocks produced by fire, the traps and the volcanic rocks. As to all 
the rocks which precede coal, with little exception, we should never 
obtain any knowledge of their theory, did we depend on the evidence 
to be derived from organized bodies. That they prove many things, 
is unquestionable; but it would be a defective system of geology 
indeed, and we might well despair of attaining any knowledge of that 
science, if we had no more knowledge and no wider views than 
Monsieur Blainville, and, (we might add,) many more, seem to 
possess on this question, 
We are equally ready to deny, and to prove it, had we room, that 
even the order of the succession and the true theory of those very 
strata in which organic remains exist, can be proved by means of 
them. This has been a favourite theory to the present day, and it 
has a large body of abettors still. But we could prove, by their own 
evidence and shewing, that it is unfounded; by quoting their own 
catalogues of the strata and their included shells, and by shewing. 
that the same genera, and the same species in many cases, occur 
through all the series, in positions the most remote. We could even 
prove it @ priori from zoological considerations. Were the assertion 
true in geology, or in organic mineralogy, (to use a better phrase,) 
then it would have been a necessary preliminary that. all climates 
should have produced, at different remote times, similar families of 
animals; that all these should have followed each other in a certain 
unvarying order, and that the same order and kinds should have 
existed and succeeded every where in one manner. It would have 
been impossible that there should now have been, had the same laws 
prevailed formerly as now, oysters at Milton, and muscles at Hastings, 
and cockles at Margate, and periwinkles at Dover, 
But we have not time for what well deserves a separate discussion ; 
and having thus far disputed Monsieur Blainville’s preliminaries, 
shall proceed to make a few remarks and extracts from a book which 
we might have ¢asily disputed at every page. 
As we cannot afford to quote a great deal, we must try to be con~ 
tent with a few passages, and shall take the following in the first 
instance. We insinuated this author’s want of logic; and surely it 
was an unjust insinuation, since the arrangement would do justice 
even to Jeremy Bentham. There is a Tudesqueness in it which is 
quite delightful, and which bespeaks the genius of a German pro- 
fessor crazed with the logic of Kant and Burgersdyck, and the reading 
of the schools, rather than the cestrus of a lively Parisian skipping 
through the dry bones of the Musée. If it is along passage, we 
can only say in its defence, as Horace Walpole did after Gray, and 
of other passages, that it ** leads to nothing.” 
