NINETEENTH CENTURY. pt. III. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 



SCIENCE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (CONTINUED). 



Piejudices which retarded the Study of Geology — Sir Charles Lyell 

 traces out the Changes now going on — Mud carried down by the 

 Ganges — Eating away of Sea-coasts— Eruption of Skaptar Jokul- 

 Earthquake of Calabria — Rise and fall of Land — 'Principles of] 

 Geology' published in 1830 — Louis Agassiz : his Early Life 

 De Saussure's Study of Glaciers —Agassiz on Europe and North 

 America being once covered with Ice— Boucher de Perthes on 

 ancient Flint Implements— MacEnery on Flint Implements in Kent's , 

 Cavern, with Bones of Extinct Animals —Swiss Lake-dwellings- 

 * Antiquity of Man,' 



In 1811, when Cuvier published his work on 'Fossil Re- 

 mains,' William Smith, who, as you remember (p. 233), first 

 studied the rocks of England, had nearly completed his 

 geological map, and scientific men were beginning, both in 

 England and Germany, to understand something of the dif- 

 ferent ages of the formations which have been laid down 

 from time to time on the surface of the globe ; yet still they 

 were prevented from reading the past history of the world 

 rightly, by several false notions which continued to prevail. 



People had so long held the belief that our earth had 

 only existed a few thousand years, that when geologists 

 began to find great numbers of strange plants and animals 

 buried in the earth's crust, immense thicknesses of rock 

 laid down by water, and whole mountain-masses which must 



