8 REPORT—1899. 
very year, 1799, that electricity as we now know it took its birth. 
It was then that Volta brought to light the apparently simple truths 
out of which so much has sprung. The world, it is true, had to wait 
for yet some twenty years before both the practical and the theoretic 
worth of Volta’s discovery became truly pregnant, under the fertilising 
influence of another discovery. The loadstone and magnetic virtues 
had, like the electrifying power of rubbed amber, long been an old 
story. But, save for the compass, not much had come from it. And 
even Volta’s discovery might have long remained relatively barren had 
it been left to itself. When, however, in 1819, Oersted made known his 
remarkable observations on the relations of electricity to magnetism, he 
made the contact needed for the flow of a new current of ideas. And it 
is perhaps not too much to say that those ideas, developing during the 
years of the rest of the century with an ever-accelerating swiftness, have 
wholly changed man’s material relations to the circumstances of life, and 
at the same time carried him far in his knowledge of the nature of 
things. 
Of all the various branches of science, none perhaps is to-day, none 
for these many years past has been, so well known to, even if not under- 
standed by, most people as that of geology. Its practical lessons have 
brought wealth to many ; its fairy tales have brought delight to more ; 
and round it hovers the charm of danger, for the conclusions to which it 
leads touch on the nature of man’s beginning. 
In 1799, the science of geology, as we now know it, was struggling 
into birth. There had been from of old cosmogonies, theories as to how 
the world had taken shape out of primeval chaos. In that fresh spirit 
which marked the zealous search after natural knowledge pursued in the 
middle and latter part of the seventeenth century, the brilliant Stenson, 
in Italy, and Hooke, in our own country, had laid hold of some of the 
problems presented by fossil remains ; and Woodward, with others, had 
laboured in the same field. In the eighteenth century, especially in its 
latter half, men’s minds were busy about the physical agencies determining 
or modifying the features of the earth’s crust ; water and fire, subsidence 
from a primeval ocean and transformation by outbursts of the central 
heat, Neptune and Pluto, were being appealed to, by Werner on the one 
hand, and by Desmarest on the other, in explanation of the earth’s pheno- 
mena. The way was being prepared, theories and views were abundant, 
and many sound observations had been made ; and yet the science of 
geology, properly so called, the exact and proved knowledge of the suc- 
cessive phases of the world’s life, may be said to date from the closing 
years of the eighteenth century. 
In 1783, James Hutton put forward in a brief memoir his ‘Theory of 
the Earth,’ which in 1795, two years before his death, he expanded into a 
book ; but his ideas failed to lay hold of men’s minds until the century had 
