1 40 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



the truth revealed itself too clearly before my eyes, so that 

 I must either have absolutely refused the testimony of my 

 senses in not seeing the truth, or that of my conscience in 

 not straightway making it known. There can be no 

 question that basalts of volcanic origin occur in Auvergne 

 and the Vivarais. There are found in Saxony, and in 

 basaltic districts generally, masses of rock with an exactly 

 similar groundmass, which enclose exactly and exclu- 

 sively the same crystals, and which have exactly the same 

 structure in the field. There is not merely an analogy, but 

 a complete similarity; and we cannot escape from the 

 conclusion that there has also been an entire identity in 

 formation and origin." : 



The frank and courageous Wernerian read his recanta- 

 tion before the Institute of France the year after his work 

 on the Saxon basalts appeared. 2 Still retaining his pro- 

 found admiration for Werner, he nevertheless relinquished 

 one after another the peculiar tenets of the Freiberg school, 

 and became so impartial a chronicler of geological progress, 

 that in his remarkably able treatise on geology, though in- 

 clining, on the whole, to his master's system, he did not 

 entirely adopt it, but presented his facts and inferences in 

 such a manner that, as he himself claimed, even a follower 



1 Geognosie, vol. ii. pp. 603, 605. 



2 " Sur les volcans et les basal tes de 1' Auvergne," read to the Institute 

 of Sciences in 1804 ; Journ. de Physique, torn. Iviii. p. 427, lix. p. 367, 

 Ixxxviii. (1819), p. 432 ; Soc. Philom. Bull Paris, 1804, p. 182. It is an 

 indication of the slowness of the transmission of scientific news in 

 those days that in the English translation of D'Aubuisson's Basalts of 

 Saxony, which appeared at Edinburgh in 1814 that is, eleven years after 

 the original the translator states that he had heard of the author's having 

 modified his views regarding the basalts of Auvergne, but that he was not 

 aware that he had expressed any change of opinion in respect of those of 

 Saxony. 



