320 GEOLOGICAL REFORM x 



speculation within these walls has been of doubtful 

 beneficence. 



The sort of geological speculation to which I am 

 now referring (geological aetiology, in short) was 

 created, as a science, by that famous philosopher 

 Immanuel Kant, when, in 1775, he wrote his 

 "General Natural History and Theory of the 

 Celestial Bodies ; or an Attempt to account for 

 the Constitutional and the Mechanical Origin of 

 the Universe upon Newtonian principles." ^ 



In this very remarkable but seemingly little- 

 known treatise,^ Kant expounds a complete cosmo- 

 gony, in the shape of a theory of the causes which 

 have led to the development of the universe 

 from diffused atoms of matter endowed with simple 

 attractive and repulsive forces. 



" Give me matter," says Kant, " and I will build 

 the world ; " and he proceeds to deduce from the 

 simple data from which he starts, a doctrine in all 

 essential respects similar to the well-known 

 " Nebular Hypothesis " of Laplace.^ He accounts 

 for the relation of the masses and the densities of 

 the planets to their distances from the sun, for the 

 eccentricities of their orbits, for their rotations, for 



* Grant {History of Physical Astronomy, p. 674) makes but 

 the briefest reference to Kant. 



- " Allgemeine Naturgesehichte und Theorie des Himmels : 

 oder Yersuch von der Vevfassung und dem mechanischen 

 Urspvunge des ganzen Weltgebaudes nach Newton'schen Grund- 

 satzen abgeliandelt. " — Kant's Sdmmtliche JVerke, Bd. i. p. 

 207. ^ Systeme du Mondc^ tome ii. chap. 6. 



