in Werners Explanation of Faults 127 



more examples of reasoning in a circle. But he would 

 never succeed in extracting an expression of doubt, or an 

 admission that the ipse dixit of the Freiberg professor 

 could for a moment be called in question. 

 . The same attitude which Werner assumed towards 

 volcanoes was consistently maintained by him in his 

 treatment of the proofs of disturbances in the terrestrial 

 crust. He seems never to have realized that any reservoir 

 of energy is stored up in the interior of our globe. It was 

 part of his teaching that the spheroidal form of the planet 

 furnished one of the proofs of a primeval universal ocean. 

 He admitted that the crust had been abundantly cracked, 

 but in these cracks he saw no evidence of any subterranean 

 action. His own statement of his views on this subject is 

 sufficiently explicit, and I quote his words : " When the 

 mass of materials of which the rocks were formed by pre- 

 cipitation in the humid way, and which was at first soft 

 and movable, began to sink and dry, fissures must of 

 necessity have been formed, chiefly in those places where 

 the greatest quantity of matter has been heaped up, or 

 where the accumulation of it has formed those elevations 

 which are called mountains." T He gave no explanation 

 of the reason why the precipitates of his universal ocean 

 should have gathered more thickly on one part of the 

 bottom than on another. It was enough for himself and 

 his disciples that he was convinced of the fact. 



As all rents in the earth's crust were thus mere super- 

 ficial phenomena resulting from desiccation and the slip- 

 ping down of material from the sides of mountains, so it 

 was conceived by Werner that, when they were filled up, 



1 Tlwory of Veins, 39. 



