INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 61? 



know not how long it has existed ; and our ancestors were on this subject as ignorant as 

 ourselves.' Some centuries afterwards, as I passed by the same place, I could not perceive 

 the slightest vestige of the city. I demanded of a peasant, who was gathering herbs upon 

 its former site, how long it had been destroyed? ' In sooth, a strange question/ replied 

 he ; * the ground here has never been different from what you now behold it.' * Was 

 there not,' said I, * of old, a splendid city here ? ' ' Never,' answered he, * so far as we know ; 

 and never did our fathers speak to us of any such.' 



" On my return there again, after the lapse of other centuries, I found the sea in the 

 same place, and on its shores were a party of fishermen, of whom I inquired how long 

 the land had been covered by the waters ? ' Is this a question,' said they, * for a man like 

 you ? This spot has always been what it is now.' 



" I again returned ages afterward, and the sea had disappeared. I inquired of a man 

 who stood alone upon the ground, how long ago the change had taken place ? and he gave 

 me the same answer that I had received before. 



" Lastly, on coming back again, after an equal lapse of time, I found there a flourishing 

 city, more populous and more rich in buildings than the city I had seen the first time ; 

 and when I would fain have informed myself regarding its origin, the inhabitants answered 

 me, * Its rise is lost in remote antiquity ; we are ignorant how long it has existed ; and 

 our fathers were on this subject no wiser than ourselves.'" 



With the exception of this myth, which presents us with a graphic picture of the 

 physical history of the earth, there is nothing of interest, in a geological point of view, in 

 the interval between the loss of the ancient civilisation, and the dawn of true inductive 

 science. Dreamers resolved fossil shells and fishes into lusus natures, and attributed them 

 to " a plastic virtue latent in the earth," or to " the tumultuous movements of terrestrial 

 exhalations," or to the influence of the heavenly bodies. Scott, in his " Marmion," refers to 

 a legend once prevalent in the neighbourhood of Whitby, that the ammonite shells, which 

 are common in that vicinity, had formerly been snakes, which the foundress of the abbey, 

 St. Hilda, succeeded in decapitating by her prayers, and then converting into stone : 



" And how the nuns of Whitby told, 

 How of countless snakes, each one 

 Was changed into a coil of stone 

 When holy Hilda pray'd. 

 Themselves within their sacred bound , 



Their stony folds had often found." 



It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the animal origin of fossil remains 

 was generally admitted ; and the eighteenth was drawing to its close before an extended 

 and enlightened prosecution of geological pursuits commenced. No individual contributed 

 more to enlist votaries in this service than Werner did, by the charm of his eloquence, 

 however unfortunate in the theory he advanced, which referred the formation of all rocks 

 to chemical precipitation from water. Abraham Gottlob Werner was born in the year 

 1750, at Welslau on the Queiss, in Upper Lausitz, where his father had the superintendence 

 of a foundery. He gave the child minerals for playthings, who thus became acquainted 

 with their names and characters in his tender years, and imbibed that love for mineralogy 

 which distinguished his advanced life. Appointed, in his twenty-fifth year, professor of 

 that science in the School of Mines at Freiberg, and subsequently Chancellor of the 

 mines of Saxony, he devoted himself to mineralogy, and to advance views of the structure 

 of the earth ; soon attracting round him, by his captivating mode of lecturing, a number 

 of admiring students, among whom the names of Alexander Humboldt, Von Buch, 

 D'Aubuisson, Jameson, Englehart, and Emmerling occur. It was maintained, in the 

 Wernerian system, that volcanic action is of recent date, and was inoperative in the early 



