2O2 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



the bottom. Basalt, at first placed by him among the 

 oldest formations, turned up incontinently among the 

 youngest. He and his disciples were consequently obliged 

 to alter and patch the Freiberg system, till it lost its 

 simplicity and self-consistence, and was still as far as ever 

 from corresponding with the complex order which nature 

 had followed. Obviously the Wernerian school had not 

 found the key to the problem, though it had done service 

 in showing how far a lithological sequence could be traced 

 among the oldest rocks. 



Button's views on this question were in some respects 

 even less advanced than Werner's. He realized, as no one 

 had ever done before him, the evidence for the universal 

 decay of the land. At the same time, he perceived that 

 unless some compensating agency came into play, the 

 whole of the dry land must eventually be washed into the 

 sea. The upturned condition of the Primary strata, which 

 had once been formed under the sea, furnished him with 

 proofs that in past time the sea-floor has been upheaved 

 into land. Without invoking any fanciful theory, he 

 planted his feet firmly on these two classes of facts, which 

 could be fully demonstrated. To his mind the earth 

 revealed no trace of a beginning, no prospect of an end. 

 All that he could see was the evidence of a succession of 

 degradations and upheavals, by which the balance of sea 

 and land and the habitable condition of our globe were 

 perpetuated. Hutton was unable to say how many of 

 these revolutions may be chronicled among the rocks of 

 the earth's crust. 1 Nor did he discover any method by 



Playfair thought that the revolutions may have been often repeated, 

 and that our present continents appear to be the third in succession, of 

 which relics may be observed among the rocks. Works, vol. iv. p. 55. 



