Mineral and Mosaical Geologies. tOQi 



we shall abstain even from endeavouring to shew the relation 

 of facts, discovered since his work appeared, with the sound 

 geology he advocates. We shall leave the hyaenas, in the cave 

 of Kirkdale, to feast on elephants, and pick their teeth with 

 rats-bones at their leisure ; we shall not stop to ask, whether 

 the gnawings on the larger bones are as evident to the natural 

 eye as to the eye of the imagination, nor whether the propor- 

 tion of Album Grsecum to the hundreds of teeth and bones 

 which, we are informed, were strewed over the mud at the bot- 

 tom of the cave, from one end to the other, " like a dog-kennel," 

 was such as is usually found in dog-kennels of the present 

 day, or only what would necessarily be left after the 

 decomposition of the more destructible matter of dead car- 

 casses. It is not, however, that we conceive the explanation of 

 the phenomena of the Yorkshire cave to be amongst those 

 things which are not permitted to the sphere of our real know- 

 ledge, or that any serious difficulty attends their reconciliation 

 to our author's geological interpretation of the sacred text ; but 

 in pure deference to him, we forbear to meddle with a subject 

 which properly belongs only to himself. We shall, therefore, 

 wait in patience for the second edition of the " Comparative 

 Estimate," in which, we are confident, our expectations will not 

 be disappointed. 



The object of the work, as its title denotes, is to examine 

 and decide between the mineral and the Mosaical geologies, as 

 to their respective pretensions to guide us in our investigation 

 of the modes by which, and the times in which, the several 

 classes of mineral matter composing this earth received their 

 sensible formations. 



The latter of these geologies is of very great antiquity, and rests its 'cre- 

 dit for the truth of the historical facts which it relates, upon a record pre- 

 tending to dinne rei-elation, and acknowledged as such by the uninterrupted 

 assent of some of the best and wisest of mankind, for upwards of three 

 thousand years. The former is of very recent origin, and can hardly be 

 said to have existed in a state approaching to maturity for more than half 

 a century. It does not indeed pretend to oppose any record to that of the 

 other ; but it aspires to establish a series of historical facts, by induction 

 from chemical principles newly:discovered, which, it affirms, disclose evi- 

 dence of truth superior to any that is presented in the professedly historical 

 document, and which must, therefore, qualify the credit which that docu- 

 ment is entitled to receive. 



It pretends that, by employing the method of analysis and 

 induction from " observation, sound principles of physics, and 

 the rules of an exact logic," introduced by the happy revolution 

 effected by Bacon and Newton in the studies of the natural 

 sciences, and by " adhering to the rules taught and practised 

 by those great teachers, it is able to reason from the sensible 

 phenomena of mineral matter, to the mode of its first forma- 

 tions and subsequent changes." The Mineral Geology (under 

 which term our author includes the Wernerian and Huttonian, 

 as well as all other geological systems not founded on the 



