294 Notices respecting New Books. 
to be done in the present stage of the science is to enrich it with 
ample stores derived from actual observation ; to collect informa- 
tion concerning the eharacter and relative positiens of the sub- 
stances composing the solid part of the globe; to specify their 
arrangement, extent and localities, and to notice such hints as 
they may furnish for elucidating the history of our planet. Every 
addition to these stores will serve to enlarge and consolidate the 
basis on which a true theory of the earth, if such can be found, 
must necessarily rest. 
Although the British Isles have been very attentively surveyed, 
and every thing relating to the geological features of some di- 
stricts examined and made known, yet there are considerable por- 
tions of the country, and these very interesting, to which the 
researches of the geologist have not yet extended. To fill up 
one of these blanks is the object of the volume before us: the 
district it embraces is extensive and important; and such has 
been the labour of the two gentlemen who have undertaken the 
task, that they have with unremitting ardour explored the whole 
line of the Yorkshire coast, from the Humber to the Tees, visit- 
ing every part of the interior likely to throw light on the objects 
of their research. Scarcely a hill or a valley, a cliff or a chasm, 
remains unexamined; scarcely an alum rock, a coal pit or a 
quarry, or any other remarkable opening in the strata, has been 
left unvisited, and the result of their labours is now laid before 
the public in a well-written memoir, illustrated by such engrav- 
ings as fully explain the subjects referred to in the text. 
The work is divided into three parts. The first consists of a 
minute description of the strata; the second part is devoted to 
an account of the organi¢ remains discovered ; and the third part 
consists of general observations, with such facts and inferences, 
hints and conjectures, as their labours have suggested. 
The limits of a Magazine are much too narrow to do justice 
to a work of this nature, either in the way of analysis or extract: 
we shall therefore content ourselves with quoting from the facts 
and inferences some observations of the authors on the hypothesis 
of successive creations or formations of strata, contended for by 
some geologists, but to which they are opposed. ‘They say, 
‘* Of our fossil organized substances, some correspond with 
recent animals and vegetables, others have no recent analogues 
hitherto known; and these two classes are so intermixed, that 
we cannot regard the latter as more ancient than the former.— 
It is a fashionable opinion among geologists, that the animals 
and vegetables imbedded in rocks, are more or less ancient, and 
differ more or less from the present animals and vegetables, ac- 
cording as they are lower or higher in the series of strata. Such 
authors speak of different races being successively created, and 
destroyed 5 
