Epitome of the Progress of Natural Science. 253 



attention of mankind to the subject, by one of those splendid 

 generalizations, which, being apparently founded on observation, 

 was for a long time implicitly received. 



Werner, in 1775, was appointed Professor of Mineralogy, in 

 the school of Mines, at Freyberg in Saxony. Familiar with the 

 regular succession of rocks, as well by the labours of his prede- 

 cessors, as by his own observations, he had — without being ori- 

 ginal in his views in relation to superposition — the great merit 

 of pointing out the application of particular phenomena, to the 

 purposes of mining. An eloquent enthusiast, and skilled in min- 

 eralogy, he soon raised up a brilliant school, to which men of 

 genius resorted from distant countries. His opinions were received 

 as oracular, and disseminated over Europe. To the school of 

 Werner we owe some of the most distinguished mineralogists. It 

 is probable that the success he met with as a mineralogist, was 

 the principal cause of his failure as a geologist, for his illustrations 

 were drawn from Freyberg and its immediate vicinity. He 

 therefore imagined a system which had scarce any other basis 

 than the limited phenomena around him, and with an amount of 

 observation, that in these days would scarce exceed the personal 

 investigations due to an ordinary memoir in the geological trans- 

 actions, declared — what the united labours of the most gifted and 

 practical geologists of the present day, have not ventured to do — 

 the law of the structure of the planet. He taught that the uni- 

 versal crust of the earth was formed of beds successively pre- 

 cipitated from a common menstruum, in the which he included 

 the whole class of intrusive rocks, now universally recognized to 

 be of igneous origin. Nothing has been more fatal to his repu- 

 tation, in Germany, as a geologist, than the manner in which he 

 overlooked the igneous nature of the rocks in his own vicinity, 

 where porphyry — which he included in his primitive rocks — not 

 only sends from below its jets and dikes through the secondary 

 rocks, but overlies the strata of the coal formation in mass. His 

 flotz rocks too, which he represented as universally horizontal, are, 

 even in the Hartz mountains — close to his type — very highly in- 

 clined ; so that his partizans found themselves either obliged to 

 renounce his system, or to contend for the possibility of entire 

 formations being at the same time horizontal and perpendicular. 

 This too, when Arduino, Dcsmaretz, Collini,Faujas, and especially 

 his countryman Raspc, all of whom preceded him, had fully shown 



