238 Geological Society : — Anniversary of 1839. 



the means of translating them into the language of a true one. 

 And the spirit of geological observation is so widely diffused, and 

 so thoroughly roused, that I trust we need not anticipate any 

 pause or retardation in the career of Descriptive Geology. I con- 

 fess, indeed, for my own part, I do not look to see the exertions 

 of the present race of geologists surpassed by any who may suc- 

 ceed them. The great geological theorizers of the past belong 

 to the Fabulous Period of the science ; but I consider the emi- 

 nent men by whom I am surrounded as the Heroic Age of geol- 

 ogy. They have slain its monsters, and cleared its wildernesses, 

 and founded here and there a great metropolis, the queen of fu- 

 ture empires. They have exerted combinations of talents which 

 we cannot hope to see often again exhibited, especially when the 

 condition of the science which produced them is changed. I 

 consider that it is now the destiny of geology to pass from the 

 heroic to the Historical Period. She can no longer look for su- 

 pernatural successess, but she is entering upon a career, I trust a 

 long and prosperous one, in which she must carry her vigilance 

 into every province of her territory, and extend her dominion 

 over the earth, till it becomes, far more truly than any before, an 

 universal empire. 



Such are the prospects of Descriptive Geology ; of the geology 

 of facts and classifications. To our knowledge of causes we can 

 look with no such certainty of its progress being steady and rapid ; 

 or rather, we are certain that the advance must be slow, and may 

 be often and long interrupted. For it is not an advance, to sug- 

 gest one or another hypothetical cause of change, without assign- 

 ing the laws and amount of the change : it is hardly an advance 

 even to calculate the results of our hypotheses on assumed con- 

 ditions. To obtain by induction, from adequate facts, the laws 

 of change of the organic and inorganic creation, — this alone can 

 lead us to those discoveries which must form the epochs of Geo- 

 logical Dynamics. And we have yet to learn, whether man's 

 past duration upon the earth, whether even that which is still 

 destined to him, is such as to allow him to philosophize with suc- 

 cess in such matters ; — whether, not individuals only, not a gen- 

 eration alone, but whether the whole species be not too ephemeral, 

 to penetrate, by the unassisted powers of its reason, into the mys- 

 tery of its origin ; — whether man, placed for a few centuries on 

 the earth as in a school-room, have time to strip the wall of its 



