OUE METHOD AND CONCLUSIONS. 147 



analogies to be used as aids in discovering or confirming ul- 

 terior and corresponding truths. Such being our main object, 

 \ve have abstained from descriptions of non-essential minutiae 

 which may be found in the geological books. We have, how- 

 ever, recognized all facts which have any essential bearing on 

 the subject of our speculations, and by the aid of these facts, 

 and of the general laws of causation and analogy which govern 

 them, and necessarily connect them with corresponding ante- 

 cedents and sequences, we have inferred the 'general nature of 

 those necessary links of the system which are lost to sensuous 

 perception. Hence we have commenced with descriptions of 

 conditions far more primitive than those from which geological 

 writers in general have started, and by the aid of the corre- 

 spondences existing between one system of developments and 

 .another, as exhibited in the law of the seven-fold series, ~we 

 have endeavored to exhibit the roots of the tree of Geology 

 as growing upon the soil of Astronomy. 



If the whole subject, as thus unfolded^ exhibits a self-sup- 

 porting and self-proving consistency, it in no small degree 

 tends to establish the correctness and importance of the method 

 of reasoning from which it receives its support. 



