280 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



described are minute, the conclusions to be derived from 

 the facts are great." 1 



Professor Zirkel was the first geologist of note who 

 took up with zeal the method of investigation so auspi- 

 ciously inaugurated by Mr. Sorby. But some five years 

 had elapsed before he made his communication on the 

 subject to the Academy of Sciences of Vienna. 2 From 

 that date (1863) he devoted himself with much zeal and 

 success to the investigation, and produced a series of papers 

 and volumes which gave a powerful impetus to the study 

 of petrography. This department of geology was indeed 

 entirely reconstituted. The most exact methods of optical 

 research were introduced into it by Professor Eosenbusch, 

 Professor Fouque, M. Michel Levy and others, and the 

 study of rocks once more competed with that of fossils in 

 attractiveness. We have only to look at the voluminous 

 literature which has sprung up in the last thirty years 

 devoted to the investigation of rocks, to see how great a 

 revolution has been effected by the introduction of the 

 microscope into the equipment of the geologist. For this 

 transformation we are, in the first instance, indebted to 

 William Nicol and Henry Clifton Sorby. 



In bringing to a close my outline of the work of those 

 who deserve to be remembered as the founders of geology, I 



1 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. xiv. (1858), p. 497. See also Mr. Sorby's 

 Presidential Addresses to the Geological Society for 1879 and 1880. 



2 Sitzungsbcr Math. Naturwiss. vol. xlvii. 1st part (1863), p. 226. In 

 this paper the author refers to previous occasional use of the microscope 

 for determining the mineralogical composition of rocks by Gustav Rose, 

 G. vom Rath, G. Jenzsch, M. Deiters and others. In England the first 

 geologist who published the results of his microscopical examination of 

 rocks was David Forbes, Popular Science Review (October 1867), vol. vi. 

 p. 355. 



