Geology 



that many of the ideas expressed at that time seem to 

 us absurd. 



We must remember, however, how many of the 

 possibilities of our modern civilization, the instruments 

 which are in daily use, such as telephone and telegraph, 

 also our railways, our steamships, power-looms, sub- 

 marines, and flying machines, would have appeared 

 impossible, if not foolish, to our countrymen of four or 

 five generations ago, and then we may be able to 

 appreciate the difficulties which the men of the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries had in accepting ideas which, 

 in the absence of a general knowledge of geological facts 

 such as we now possess, would be as strange to them as 

 that of wireless telegraphy to a person who had never 

 heard of electricity. 



A few writers believed that the fossils were the relics 

 of animals and plants that had in past ages peopled 

 the surface of the Earth, but this view did not meet with 

 very general acceptance. Others preferred to consider 

 them as the creatures yet unborn which would one day 

 come to life and people the globe a belief which those 

 who have visited the fossil galleries of one of our great 

 museums and seen the remains of the great fossil reptiles 

 will be glad to learn is no longer held by those best 

 competent to judge. 



Another argument whose worthlessness will, I think, 

 be at once apparent, but which nevertheless at the time it 

 was broughtforward received some support, was thatfossils 

 had nothing whatever to do with life, past, present, or future, 

 but that Nature, always working symmetrically, having 

 produced certain forms in the animate world, could not 

 avoid the formation of similar shapes in the inanimate. 



