374 Reports and Proceedings — Royal Microscoiyical Society. 



wife Pandora, and the story of the sealed box, which she was 

 forbidden to open, and how the curiosity of Pandora canned her 

 to raise the lid, when all the evils incident to humanity poured out, 

 and the only good remaining was Hope, which has been the solace 

 of mankind ever since. 



But leaving the regions of classical and mediaeval myths, and even 

 passing over unnoticed the earlier writers and philosophers — whose 

 observations, though often very good, ended frequently in the 

 fabulous and mysterious, or were intermingled with gross errors- 

 resulting from ignorance of astronomical laws and cosmical and 

 chemical effects — we come, in 1669, to the observations of Steno, 

 a professor of the Padua University, who compared fossil shells with 

 recent, and showed that the two were often specifically the same — 

 that sharks' teeth from the hills of Eome were like those of a shark 

 now living in the Mediterranean. 



The eighteenth century gave birth to many able philosophers and 

 also to many writers having a distorted vision resulting from a firm 

 belief in the literal acceptance of the Mosaic cosmogony, into which 

 they constrained their facts and observations to fit. 



Gesner, a Swiss observer, in 1759 demonstrated, by comparing 

 past physical changes with those now in progress, that elevation of 

 mountains and the wearing away of ravines and valleys must have 

 occupied tens of thousands of years to accomplish. 



Dr. John Woodward (1665-1729) insisted on the theory that all 

 deposits resulted from the Noachian deluge, and that their materials^ 

 Jind fossil contents were arranged by gravitation, the heaviest at the 

 bottom. He did one excellent thing, he founded in Cambridge the 

 Woodwardian chair of geology, which has now become a great 

 centre for the teaching of modern geology, but was originally 

 designed to ensure the deliver^' of a sermon annually, to confound 

 the doctrines of Dr. Camerarius, of Tubingen, and all his works, 

 because he differed from the views of Woodward. 



Some of the writings of the Italian naturalists at this time 

 were most brilliant and advanced, but the lack of frequent inter- 

 communication between men of science 150 years ago prevented 

 the wide spread of intellectual ideas. 



Amongst the most able writers in this country was James Hutton 

 (1726-1797), of Edinburgh, whose "Theory of the Earth," etc., 

 was the foundation of Lyell's " Principles of Geology " and many 

 other later writings. His views, based on observations, were clear 

 and convincing to all studious minds : — 



" The ruins of an older world are visible in the present structure 

 of our planet ; and the strata which now compose our continents 

 have been once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the waste 

 of pre-existing continents. The same forces are still destroying, by 

 chemical decomposition or mechanical violence, even the hardest 

 rocks, and transporting the materials to the sea, where they are 

 spread out and form new strata analogous to those of more ancient 

 date. Although loosely deposited along the bottom of the ocean,. 

 they become afterwards altered and consolidated by volcanic heat,. 

 and then heaved up, fractured, and contorted." 



