Progress of Geology. 245 



Cuvier brought to the task of such unparalleled interest which 

 thus devolved upon him ; and he has so well executed it, that 

 in reading his works, and those to which his have given occa- 

 sion, we seem to be wandering in a land of enchantment. His 

 magical power has called from the slumber of ages the unwieldy 

 and marvellous forms of antediluvian life ; and we find around 

 us an array of paleotheriums and anoplotheriums, of extinct 

 crocodiles and pelicans, which appear in all the bodily reality 

 tJiat their present successors exhibit to us in Mr WombwelFs 

 menagerie. 



These discoveries were of the most attractive interest, even 

 if we were to confine ourselves to the zoological views which 

 they present, and they speedily led to similar investigations of 

 various spots in Europe, and to the discovery of other basins 

 and deposites more or less resembling those of Paris. But be- 

 sides this charm, there was another train of inference, or at least 

 of irresistible conjecture, to which they drew men's thoughts. 

 There was contained in the succession of different races of ani- 

 mals, thus unbedded in the materials of our earth, the evidence 

 of changes and revolutions which had taken place in a manner 

 and order hitherto imguessed. Incursions and retreats of the 

 sea, changes in the form and elevation of continents, dislocation 

 and rupture of large portions of the crust of the earth ; such 

 and many more were the operations of which the history was 

 read in the facts thus disclosed : and this violence and ruin 

 was interwoven as it appeared with the existence of dry land 

 supporting vegetables and quadrupeds, that were but one re- 

 move from those of our present world. The fascination of such 

 speculations would have been all-powerful if the phenomena had 

 not been incalculably better adapted to suggest problems and 

 perplexities, than to help us to their solutions. As the matter 

 was, geologists saw^ the futility of attempting at present to ex- 

 plain all these strange discoveries by hypothesis, and with an in- 

 tellectual temperance and self-command, very different from the 

 spirit of former times, went on with their labours, content to be 

 certain and clear in limited propositions, and leaving the true ge- 

 neral view of the connexion of those appearances to unfold itself 

 when the proper epoch should arise. 



Still it must be allowed, that the almost universal impression 

 among geological speculators was, that the causes by whicli the 



