240 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



most remarkable achievement of the kind which up to that 

 time had been accomplished by a single individual. 1 



We have now traced the slow and somewhat fitful 

 progress of stratigraphical geology during the two last 

 decades of the eighteenth century and the first two 

 decades of the present. From the youngest alluvial 

 deposits, through the Tertiary and Secondary formations, 

 down to the Carboniferous system, the clue had been 

 found by which the strata could be identified from one 

 district and one country to another. A prodigious im- 

 petus was now given to the study of geology. The 

 various stratified formations, arranged in their true 

 chronological order, were now seen to contain the regular 

 and decipherable records of the history of our globe, 

 which could be put together with as much certainty as 

 the faded manuscripts of human workmanship. The 

 organic remains contained in them were found to be not 

 random accumulations, heaped together by the catastrophes 

 of bygone ages, but orderly chronicles of old sea-floors, 

 lake-bottoms, and land-surfaces. The centre of gravity of 

 geology was now rapidly altered, especially in France and 

 in Britain. Minerals and rocks no longer monopolized 

 the attention of those who interested themselves in the 

 crust of the earth. The petrified remains of former plants 

 and animals ceased to be mere curiosities. Their meaning 

 as historical documents was at last realized. They were 

 seen to have a double interest, for while they told the 

 story of the successive vicissitudes which the surface of 

 the earth had undergone, from remote ages down to the 



1 A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, 1819 ; A map of 

 Scotland, 1840 ; and Memoirs to His Majesty's Treasury respecting the 

 Geological Map of Scotland, by J. Macculloch, 1836. 



