SYSTEMATIC DESCRIPTIVE GEOLOGY. 563 



with. As we have already said, he promulgated, 

 as representing the world, a scheme collected froift 

 a province, and even too hastily gathered from that 

 narrow field. Yet his intense spirit of method in 

 some measure compensated for other deficiencies, 

 and enabled him to give the character of a science 

 to what had been before a collection of miscel- 

 laneous phenomena. The ardour of system-making 

 produced a sort of fusion, which, however super- 

 ficial, served to bind together the mass of incohe- 

 rent and mixed materials, and thus to form, though 

 by strange and anomalous means, a structure of 

 no small strength and durability, like the ancient 

 vitrified structures which we find in some of our 

 mountain regions. 



Of a very different temper and character was 

 William Smith. No literary cultivation of his youth 

 awoke in him the speculative love of symmetry 

 and system ; but a singular clearness and precision 

 of the classifying power, which he possessed as 

 a native talent, was exercised and developed by 

 exactly those geological facts among which his phi- 

 losophical task lay. Some of the advances which 

 he made, had, as we have seen, been at least entered 

 upon by others who preceded him : but of all this 

 he was ignorant; and, perhaps, went on more 

 steadily and eagerly to work out his own ideas, 

 from the persuasion that they were entirely his own. 

 At a later period of his life, he himself described 



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