EVOLUTION OF THE PRESENT FROM THE PAST. 529 



essential for research are the Catalogue of the Library of the Geological 

 Society, Ormerod's Index to the Publications of the Geological Society, 

 the Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers, and the publica- 

 tions of the Palseontographical Society. The literature which bears 

 on work thus discovered and assimilated, but not before Nature has 

 been first read with unbiassed powers, we turn from books to Museums ; 

 and there see the formations divested of sediment, with their life in 

 the cabinets as on the old sea-beds ; and so journey on from one 

 museum to another, from country to country, comparing rocks and 

 faunas, until the fossil life becomes migratory like that of this exist- 

 ing world of ours, and the conditions of its existence and modification 

 are seen. 



Thus the mind becomes saturated with a conception of the order 

 of Nature, from which it is found that in all ways the past contains 

 within itself the interpretation of the existing world. By using this 

 illumination which the geologist has to give, the studies of the geo- 

 grapher and the naturalist are divested of their isolated character, and 

 take places in a kosmos. In earlier times it was necessary, as a pre- 

 liminary, to show how the present order of Nature is analogous to that 

 exhibited in the strata, and that work was well done by Hutton and 

 Lyell ; but such comparison is only a step in grouping facts, explains 

 nothing but the processes of Nature, and leaves the sequence and 

 method of her work unexplored. The existing natural history of the 

 earth may render its past history intelligible, but it does not account 

 for its Existence, its course of Evolution, or its Facts ; these are the 

 inheritance of the Geologist. The progress of Earth's history has been 

 from the past to the present, and the function of the geologist is to 

 demonstrate how the existing world perpetuates the past, and has 

 been evolved from it in all ways. The great departments of geology 

 have been surveyed already ; but the fabric of geological science has 

 yet to be constructed. Facts lie to hand in all parts of the earth, and 

 need only to be organised and vitalised by law to become luminous 

 with their history. As this process takes form it will become clearer 

 that Geological history is an Evolution, in which deposition of strata, 

 elaboration of igneous products and ore deposits, and succession and 

 distribution of life, are mutually dependent phenomena, which exem- 

 plify the persistence and action of physical laws that govern the earth 

 without variableness. 



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