S46 Progress of Geology. 



earth had been urged from the state evidenced by one formation 

 to that exhibited in another, were different from any agencies 

 of which we have any experience. In the dislocation of provin- 

 ces, — in the elevation of hills from the bottom of the sea, — in the 

 comminution and dispersion of vast tracts of the hardest rocks, 

 —in the obliteration and renewal of a whole creation, they 

 seemed to themselves to see, without the possibility of mistake, 

 the manifestation of powers more energetic and extensive than 

 those which belong to the common course of every-day nature. 

 They conceive, that what even might be the causes which had 

 been at work in these former ages, their fury was now spent, 

 their task performed, their occupation gone. 



They spoke of a break in the continuity of Nature''s opera- 

 tions ; of the present state of things as permanent and tranquil ; 

 the past having been progressive and violent. They considered 

 the existing condition of the earth as separated by a vast chasm 

 from its previous convulsions. They could not imagine how 

 theorists were to pass by any known road from a creation in 

 which scarcely one species of animal (if one) was identical with 

 those which now live, to the world of our contemporary shell- 

 fish and crocodiles ; or how the strata of the Isle of Wight, 

 thousands of feet thick, were by any usual machinery to be 

 overturned and set on edge. And these difficulties do no 

 doubt appear, even at this day, so formidable to most geognosts, 

 that they will not acknowledge themselves bound to account for 

 such alarming revolutions, nor do we believe that Mr I^yell, 

 stout-hearted as he his, would have ventured upon this perilous 

 expedition into realms of chaos, if he had not found a half-way 

 station in the fourth class of strata, the penultimate * formations 

 of which we now proceed to speak. 



Italt/ : Penultimate Formations. — These formations consist of 

 strata more recent than the regular tertiaries to which we have 

 referred, and yet announcing, by their fossils or their position, an 

 antiquity greater than that belonging to the present condition of 

 our globe. 



They thus seem to offer themselves as the results of the state 

 of things which last preceded that under which we live and 

 geologize, and indeed they are, in a greater or less degree, inter- 

 woven with the existing condition of things. It is curious that 

 this fourth class of phenomena carries us to Italian rocks and 

 " We would rather say Qnatermry formations. 



