564 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY. 



the views which had animated him in his earlier 

 progress. In this account he dates his attempts 

 to discriminate and connect strata from the year 

 1790, at which time he was twenty years old. In 

 1792, he "had considered how he could best repre- 

 sent the order of surperposition continuity of course 

 and general eastern declination of the strata." 

 Soon after, doubts which had arisen were removed 

 by the " discovery of a mode of identifying the 

 strata by the organized fossils respectively imbedded 

 therein." And " thus stored with ideas," as he ex- 

 presses himself, he began to communicate them to 

 his friends. In all this, we see great vividness of 

 thought and activity of mind, unfolding itself ex- 

 actly in proportion to the facts with which it had 

 to deal. We are reminded of that cyclopean archi- 

 tecture in which each stone, as it occurs, is, with 

 wonderful ingenuity, and with the least possible 

 alteration of its form, shaped so as to fit its place 

 in a solid and lasting edifice. 



Different yet again was the character (as a geo- 

 logical discoverer), of the great naturalist of the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century. In that part 

 of his labours of which we have now to speak, 

 Cuvier's dominant ideas were rather physiological 

 than geological. In his views of past physical 

 changes, he did not seek to include any ranges of 

 facts which lay much beyond the narrow field of 



34 Phil. Mag. 1833, vol. i. p. 38. 



