638 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY. 



its own facts to its own ideas, it confines each 

 science within its own limits, and condemns it as 

 empty and helpless, when it pronounces upon those 

 subjects which are extraneous to it. The errour of 

 persons who should seek a geological narrative in 

 theological records, would be rather in the search 

 itself than in their interpretation of what they 

 might find ; and in like manner the errour of those 

 who would conclude against a supernatural begin- 

 ning, or a providential direction of the world, upon 

 geological or physiological reasonings, would be, 

 that they had expected those sciences alone to place 

 the origin or the government of the world in its 

 proper light. 



Though these observations apply generally to all 

 the palsetiological sciences, they may be permitted 

 here, because they have an especial bearing upon 

 some of the difficulties which have embarrassed the 

 progress of geological speculation ; and though such 

 difficulties are, I trust, nearly gone by, it is impor- 

 tant for us to see them in their true bearing. 



From what has been said, it follows that geo- 

 logy and astronomy are, of themselves, incapable of 

 giving us any distinct and satisfactory account of 

 the origin of the universe, or of its parts. We 

 need not wonder, then, at any particular instance of 

 this incapacity ; as, for example, that of which we 

 have been speaking, the impossibility of accounting 

 by any natural means for the production of all the 

 successive tribes of plants and animals which have 



