in Werner s Universal Ocean 119 



menon took place, is a very different thing from ascertain- 

 ing how it happened." 1 I do not suppose that in the 

 whole literature of science a better illustration could be 

 found of the advice " When you meet with an insuper- 

 able difficulty, look it steadfastly in the face and pass on." 



One might have thought that having disposed of the 

 universal ocean, even in this rather peremptory fashion, 

 the Wernerians would have been in no hurry to call it 

 back again, and set the same stupendous and inexplicable 

 machinery once more going. But the exigencies of their 

 theory left them no choice. Having determined, as an 

 incontrovertible fact, that certain rocks had been deposited 

 as chemical precipitates in a definite order from a universal 

 ocean, when these philosophers, as their knowledge of 

 Nature increased, found that some of these so-called pre- 

 cipitates occurred out of their due sequence and at much 

 higher altitudes than had been supposed, they were com- 

 pelled to bring back the universal ocean, and make it rise 

 high over hills from which it had already receded. Not 

 only had they to call up the vasty deep, but they had to 

 endow it with rapid and even tumultuous movement, 

 as it swept upwards over forest-clothed lands. Having 

 raised it as high as their so-called Floetz formations ex- 

 tended, and having allowed its waters to settle and deposit 

 precipitates of basalt and greenstone, they had to hurry it 

 away again to the unknown regions where it still remains. 

 This, forsooth, was the system that discarded hypothesis 

 and rested proudly on an irrefragable foundation of demon- 

 strable fact. 



Among the features of the Wernerian school, one of the 



1 Jameson, op. cit. p. 82. 



