334 PRIMARY ORIGIN 



tion, which may have occasional marks of ingenuity, and 

 but little else. 



The carefully-made observations of those who, with 

 unwearying industry, have traversed hill and valley, 

 marked and measured the various characters, thicknesses, 

 inclinations, and positions of rocks ; who have watched 

 the influences of heat in changing, of water in wearing, 

 and the results of precipitation in forming, strata ; who 

 have traced the mechanical effects of earthquake strag- 

 glings and of volcanic eruptions, and, reasoning from an 

 immense mass of accumulated facts, deduced certain 

 general conclusions, are, however, of a totally different 

 character ; and it is such observers as these who induced 

 Herschel to say truly, that " geology, in the magnitude 

 and sublimity of the objects of which it treats, un- 

 doubtedly ranks, in the scale of the sciences, next to 

 astronomy."* 



The origin of this planet is involved in great obscurity, 

 which the powers of the most gifted are unable to pene- 

 trate. It stands the work of an Almighty and Eternal 

 mind, the beginning of which we cannot comprehend, 

 nor can we define the period of its termination. 



It may, probably, be safe to speculate that there was 

 a time when this globe consisted of only one homo- 

 geneous stratum. Whether this remains, whether, in 

 our plutonic rocks, our granites, or our porphyries, we 

 have any indications of the primitive state of the world,, 

 or whether numerous changes took place before even our 

 unstratified formations had birth, are questions we 

 cannot answer. The geologist looks back into the vista 

 of time, and reckons, by phenomena, the progress of the 

 world's mutations. The stratified formations must 

 have occupied thousands of ages ; but before these were, 

 during a period extending over countless thousands, the 



* Preliminary Discourse; Sir J. F. W. Herschel. Lardner's 

 Cabinet Cyclopaedia. 



