EARTH 



SCIENCES 



LIBRARY 



PREFACE. 



THE History of Geology and Paleontology was originally en- 

 trusted to Julius Ewald of Berlin. The Historical Commission 

 of the Bavarian Royal Academy of Sciences could not have 

 made a happier choice. Ewald was one of the few geologists 

 who had been actively engaged in geological research during 

 the first half of the nineteenth century; he had witnessed the 

 most brilliant period of the rise of geology in Germany, and 

 had been for a long time personally acquainted with most of 

 the great exponents of the science on the Continent. Unfor- 

 tunately it was not granted to Ewald to bring his task to 

 completion. A few years before his death his feeble health 

 compelled him to give up the work he had undertaken, and 

 the results of many years' labour which he had expended upon 

 it were entirely lost, as his will directed that all his unfinished 

 manuscripts should be destroyed. 



Although the present author of the History of Geology was 

 asked to depict chiefly the history of the growth of the science 

 in Germany, the nature of the subject is such that it could not 

 be successfully treated along national lines. All civilised 

 nations have shared in the development of the natural sciences, 

 the history of any one of which must be to a certain extent 

 the history of a scientific freemasonry. The questions of the 

 highest import in Geology and Palaeontology are in no way 

 affected by political frontiers, and the contributions to the 



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