1866.] On the Antiquity of the Volcanos of Auvergne. 199 
writing. The man of science recognizes such merit as the evidence 
may possess, in spite of the masquerading dress it wears—the man 
of business is prone to turn a deat ear to it altogether, because of 
this disguise and disfigurement. The former looks upon such an 
exhibition as something analogous to the aberrations of form which 
under certain circumstances beset the crystallization of certain salts, 
and the grotesqueness of the form assumed blinds him in neither 
case to the real nature of the substance before him. It is the 
sweeping style just now mentioned to which he objects, as he 
judges by sense and not by sound, whereas it is the stilted style 
which is an abomination to the chairman of a Parliamentary Com- 
mittee, and may cost the cause which is advocated in it his help, his 
influence, and his vote. 
IV. ON THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VOLCANOS OF 
AUVERGNE. 
By Cuarztes Davupeny, M.D., F.RS., Professor of Botany 
at the University of Oxford. 
(Illustrated.) 
ACCUSTOMED, as we are, from our earliest infancy to have the first 
elementary truths of astronomy instilled into our minds, we can 
scarcely realize the idea, that nations, even in an advanced state of 
mental progress, were in the habit of viewing our relations to 
the celestial bodies around us in quite a different light from that in 
which they present themselves to us at the present time. 
Almost every child who has had a few months’ instruction in a 
parish school knows, that the earth turns round the sun, that the 
circle which bounds our horizon is not the limit of the universe, 
that the moon revolves in an orbit, which, although unapproachable 
by us from its distance alone, is near in comparison with the space 
which divides us from the sun, and yet that this great luminary 
is placed, as it were, within our own immediate neighbourhood, as 
compared with the distance which separates us from even the nearest 
of the fixed stars. 
But these persuasions have grown up within a very recent 
period, and are due to the slow infiltration of philosophic truths 
into the minds of the vulgar, gradually displacing the earlier notions 
which had been acquired through the apparent testimony of our 
senses, 
In the most flourishing periods of ancient Greece and Rome, in 
medizval times, and even in ages approaching to our own, the same 
belief did not exist; nor, indeed, was a knowledge on such subjects 
a part of what the Almighty thought fit to impart by supernatural 
means to his chosen people. 
VOL. Ill. P 
