MODERN SCIENCE. 17* 



much as suspected three hundred years ago, namely : (l.) the 

 vast antiquity of creation ; (n.) the process of the earth's 

 formation ; (ill.) the remote antiquity of man ; (IV.) the 

 confirmation of the permanency of law in the inorganic 

 world, as it is found to exist in the organic world a fact 

 made plain before, by Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Laplace, 

 but corroborated here by such plain evidence that it can 

 be verified daily by any plain man. This makes geology 

 a complete and fascinating science. But it is so far removed 

 from the ideas entertained three centuries ago, that we may 

 be sure it would have found powerful opponents then as 

 astronomy did. For instance, we may easily imagine how 

 schoolmen would have exercised their power of raillery at 

 the expense of the benighted geologists for their researches 

 and work ; fancy a Humboldt, a Murchison, a Scrope actually 

 exploring the whole globe, to find, what ? just the facts we 

 have mentioned ; whereas it was sufficient for them (the school- 

 men) to think in order to know all about it. And the geologist, 

 they would have said, shows us only the process of formation of 

 rocks, the composition of those rocks, the order of their super- 

 position, and so forth but he does not tell us why basalt 

 is not bright yellow, or why the sea fails to produce it as 

 well as volcanoes. The geologist would reply that its 

 constituents being chiefly felspar and augite, it could not be 

 bright yellow, and that being volcanic and the sea not being a 

 volcano (!) the sea could not produce it, a reason which 

 they would have thought very unscientific, and therefore 

 very poor. This remark is no overdrawn analogy of their 

 logic, for they have actually made use of this very kind 

 of reasoning (we could quote instances) in face of natural 

 phenomena. They would have scouted the idea of consider- 

 ing what the geologist teaches us as being worth knowing. 

 What he ought to have sought and done, they would contend, 

 was to transform basalt into schist, and schist into con- 

 glomerate, and that into quartz, and that into a jelly-fish, and 

 the jelly-fish into a gooseberry-bush or a turnip at the very 

 least which he cannot do therefore he is not a man of 

 science, but only an empirical idler like Gilbert or Galileo, for 

 no doubt they would have called his labours " experiments." 



