MODERN GEOLOGY 



have been ice, or water, or a conglomerate of water and 

 solids, according to the random fancies of the theorists ; 

 and the final separation into land and water was con- 

 ceived to have taken place in all the ways which fancy, 

 quite unchecked by any tenable data, could invent. 



Whatever important changes in the general character 

 of the surface of the globe were conceived to have taken 

 place since its creation were generally associated with 

 the Mosaic deluge, and the theories which attempted to 

 explain this catastrophe were quite on a par with those 

 which dealt with a remoter period of the earth's his- 

 tory. Some speculators, holding that the interior 

 of the globe is a great abyss of waters, conceived 

 that the crust had dropped into this chasm and had 

 thus been inundated. Others held that the earth had 

 originally revolved on a vertical axis, and that the sud- 

 den change to its present position had caused the catas- 

 trophic shifting of its oceans. But perhaps the favorite 

 theory was that which supposed a comet to have wan- 

 dered near the earth, and in whirling about it to have 

 carried the waters, through gravitation, in a vast tide 

 over the continents. 



Thus blindly groped the majority of eighteenth-cen- 

 tury philosophers in their attempts to study what we 

 now term geology. Deluded by the old deductive 

 methods, they founded not a science, but the ghost of a 

 science, as immaterial and as unlike anything in nature 

 as any other phantom that could be conjured from the 

 depths of the speculative imagination. And all the 

 while the beckoning earth lay beneath the feet of these 

 visionaries; but their eyes were fixed in air. 



At last, however, there came a man who had the 



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