384 THE KIDDLE OF THE UNIVEBSE. 



three extremely important results of general import. 

 In the first place, it has excluded from the story of the 

 earth all question of miracle, all question of super- 

 natural agencies, in the building of the mountains and 

 the shaping of the continents. In the second place, 

 our idea of the length of the vast period of time 

 which has been absorbed in their formation has been 

 considerably enlarged. We now know that the huge 

 mountains of the palaeozoic, mesozoic, and cenozoic 

 formations have taken, not thousands, but millions of 

 years in their growth. In the third place, we now 

 know that all the countless fossils that are found in 

 those formations are not " sports of nature," as was 

 believed 150 years ago, but the petrified remains of 

 organisms that lived in earlier periods of the earth's 

 history, and arose by gradual transformation from 

 a long series of ancestors. 



III. PROGRESS OF PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY. 



The many important discoveries which these funda- 

 mental sciences have made during the nineteenth 

 century are so well known, and their practical appli- 

 cation in every branch of modern life is so obvious, 

 that we need not discuss them in detail here. In 

 particular, the application of steam and electricity has 

 given to our nineteenth century its characteristic 

 " machinist- stamp." But the colossal progress of 

 inorganic and organic chemistry is not less important. 

 All branches of modern civilization — medicine and 

 technology, industry and agriculture, mining and 

 forestry, land and water transport — have been so much 

 improved in the course of the century, especially in 

 the second half, that our ancestors of the eighteenth 



