PLOT 227 



fossils ; the first to recognise the orderly sequence of 

 deposits ; the first to perceive their occasional interrup- 

 tion by those discordances, which we now term uncon- 

 formities ; the first to employ geological structure to 

 arrive at geological history and to inform us of the 

 revolutions through which our globe has passed ; said we 

 not truly that this man was the father and founder of 

 our science ? 



In attempting to carry his explanations farther and 

 to push them deeper, Steno was less happy : his brave 

 imagination, successful so far, was now T to suffer from the 

 restraints imposed upon it by a belief in the brevity of 

 the world's existence. The stage which immediately 

 preceded that represented by Steno's sixth diagram stood 

 before his mind as the beginning of created times, and 

 all the subsequent events of the earth's history had to be 

 compressed into a poor 6,000 years ! Without a more 

 generous allowance of time no genius, however gifted, 

 could hope to trace the slowly pacing processes of Nature ; 

 and the fame of Steno would undoubtedly have burned 

 brighter had he desisted from the attempt and refrained 

 from an endeavour to reconcile the irreconcilable. 



Contemporary with Steno was the celebrated Dr. Plot 

 of this University, the first keeper of the Ashmolean 

 Museum, whose great work on "The Natural History 

 of Oxfordshire " appeared in 1677, eight years after the 

 publication of Steno's " De Solido," &c. This was 220 

 years ago, in the middle of the reign of Charles II., about 

 fifty years after the Fellows of Wadham College and 

 their friends met together to bring into existence the 

 Royal Society, for which the good king did so much by 

 judiciously letting it alone ; modern chemistry had but 

 just sprung into being under the influence of Eobert 

 Boyle, and Newton's " Principia " had not yet enlightened 

 the w r orld. 



