88 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



crystallization in the waters of a primeval ocean. The 

 vertical or highly inclined limestones, and other strata 

 flanking the granite, were for a long time regarded by him 

 as still in the position in which they were originally de- 

 posited. It was only when he found among these strata 

 layers of sand and rounded pehbles that he was driven to 

 admit that there had been some disturbance of the earth's 

 surface. 



Like Pallas and his contemporaries generally, De 

 Saussure never attempted to set down his observations of 

 the distribution of the rock formations upon a map, nor, 

 though he had before him the excellent sections con- 

 structed by Lehmann, to which reference will be made 

 in the following lecture, did he give definite expression to 

 his ideas of the mutual relations of the rocks by construct- 

 ing a horizontal section even of the most general and 

 diagrammatic kind. It is thus a somewhat laborious 

 task to gather from his Voyages dans les Alpes what 

 precisely were the opinions he held in regard to 

 tectonic questions. To him, however, so far as I have 

 been able to discover, we owe the first adoption of the 

 terms geology and geologist. Our science had formed a 

 part of mineralogy, and subsequently of physical geography. 

 The earliest writer who dignified it with the name it now 

 bears was the first great explorer of the Alps. 1 



1 In the year 1778 there appeared at the Hague the first imperfect 

 edition of De Luc's Lettres Physiques et Morales sur les Montagues, in the 

 introduction to which the author states that for the science that treats of 

 the knowledge of the earth he employs the designation of Cosmology. 

 The proper word, he admits, should have been Geology, but he " could not 

 venture to adopt it because it was not a word in use " (Preface, p. viii. ) In 

 the completed edition of his work, published the next year, he repeats his 

 statement as to the use of the term Cosmology, yet he uses Geology in his 



