474 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



thinking it quite improbable that they would be found sufficiently rich 

 in ores to be worked economically. 



Whatever may have been Richard Owen's powers as a thinker or 

 teacher, his key to the Geology of the Globe, published in 1857 

 when professor of geology and chemistry in the University of Ten- 

 nessee, is beyond question the most extraordinary 



Richard Owen's . »ti 



oeoiogy of the oiobe, travesty on geology and geological methods of deduc- 

 tion that has ever emanated from the American press. 

 The fundamental idea seems to have been that there are analogies 

 between organic and world development. 



Our planet, perhaps, typifies an ovule from the solar matrix. In its earlier igne- 

 ous chaotic state it bore analogy to the yet undeveloped amorphous structure of 

 vegetable ovules and the animal ovum. Like them, it had at an early period a 

 nucleus, on which after a time air and moisture deposited additional materials, 

 derived from the matrix. At a later period yet a part of these same materials were 

 carried in mechanical mixture, partly in chemical solution, to promote the develop- 

 ment of laterformations, forming new continents, etc., just as a portion of the seed 

 i the albumen) and the foodyolk of the egg go to nourish the expanding germ. 



The- separation of continents typifies the propagation of offshoots, or artificially by 

 cuttings in plants, and seems to resemble the fissiparous mode of reproduction observed 

 among the lowest animals. In some of the earlier cataclysms we have the type of 

 the ruptured Graafian vesicles, while at a final convulsive deluge, the period when 

 the Western Continent and Australia were detached, and when possibly the moon 

 as a terrestrial ovule was thrown into space, we readily recognize the type of rup- 

 tured pericarpal dissemination of seed in the vegetable world, of completed incuba- 

 tion and parturition in the animal kingdom. * * * 



It is by no means contended that this earth is a monstrous organism, with all the 

 parts and properties of a plant or animal; but simply that in it we have everything 

 developed according to the same laws and plan pervading the rest of creation; that 

 in it we see foreshadowed the type of those future forms and changes which organic 

 1 xxlies undergo by the assimilation of these very inorganic materials. 



The idea underlying all these generalizations, which the author 

 claimed to have gained while studying sundry maps spread out on the 

 floor of a vacant room, in order to place before his classes ' ' some great 

 principles of generalization,"' is that the "formations of the western 

 continent corresponded in many respects to those in the eastern" 

 * * * and "that they must have been detached at some period 

 from each other." 



He conceived that " the earth in some of its former geological epochs 

 occupied a smaller volume than before the whole of the present super- 

 ficies emerged from the ocean and than it did before some of the later 

 successive layers were deposited on the earlier formations." Further, 

 that the original internal nucleus of the earth was of the form of a cube 

 or spherical tetrahedron, and that the rocks of the different successive 

 geological periods will be found less and less dense in structure as 

 they leave the north pole and approach the equator. When these 

 beds were upheaved, "the edges of the formations appear to have been 

 brought to the surface along concentric lines, which are parts of great 



