416 Notices of Memoirs — Prof. Lap-worth'' s Address. 



the investigator. Their outcropping edges constitute the solid framework, the 

 surface of which forms the physical geography of the lands of the present day, and 

 their internal characters and inter-relationships afford us our only clues to the 

 physical geographies of bygone ages. Within them lies enshrined all that we may 

 ever hope to discover of the history and the development of the habitable world of 

 the past. 



These formations are to the stratigraphical geologist what species are to the 

 biologist, or what the heavenly bodies are to the astronomer. It was the discovery 

 of these formations which first elevated geology to the rank of a science. In the 

 working out of their characters, their relationships, their development, and their 

 origin, geology finds its means, its aims, and its justification. Whatever fresh 

 material our science may yield to man's full conception of nature, organic and 

 inorganic, must of necessity be grouped around these special and peculiar objects 

 of its contemplation. 



When the great Werner first taught that our earth-crust was made up of 

 superimposed rock-sheets or formations arranged in determinable order, the value 

 of his conclusions from an economic point of view soon led to their enthusiastic 

 and careful study ; but his crude theory of their successive precipitation from a 

 universal chaotic ocean disarmed the suspicions of the many until the facts 

 themselves had gained such a wide acceptance that denial was no longer possible. 

 But when the greater Scotchman, Hutton, asserted that each of these rock- 

 formations was in reality nothing more nor less than the recemented ruins of an 

 earlier world, the prejudices of mankind at large were loosed at a single stroke. 

 Like Galileo's assertion of the movement of the globe, this demanded such an 

 apparently undignified and improbable mode of creation that there is no wonder 

 that, even down to the present day, there still exist some to whom this is a hard 

 saying, to be taken, if taken at all, in homoeopathic doses and with undisguised 

 reluctance. 



' Hutton as regards his philosophy was, as we know, far in advance of his time. 

 With all the boldness of conviction he unflinchingly followed out these ideas to 

 their legitimate results. He claimed that as the stratified formations were 

 composed of similar materials— sands, clays, limestones, and muds — to those now 

 being laid down in the seas around our present coasts, they must, like them, have 

 been the products of ordinary natural agencies of rain, rivers, and sea waters, 

 internal heat and external cold, acting precisely as they act now. And, further, as 

 these formations lie one below the other, in apparently endless downward 

 succession, and all formed more or less of these fragmentary materials, so the 

 present order of natural phenomena must have existed for untold ages. Indeed, to 

 the commencement of this order he frankly admits ' I see no trace of a beginning 

 or sign of an end." 



The history of the slow acceptance of Hutton's doctrines, even among geologists, 

 is, of course, perfectly familiar to us all. William Smith reduced the disputed 

 formations to order, and showed that not only was each composed of the ruins of 

 a vanished land, but that each contained in its fossils the proof that it was 

 deposited in a vanished sea inhabited by a special life creation. Cuvier followed, 

 and placed it beyond question that the fossilised relics of these departed beings 

 were such as made it absolutely unquestionable that these creatures might well 

 have inhabited the earth at the present day. Lyell completed the cycle by 

 demonstrating stage by stage the efficiency of present natural agencies to do all the 

 work required for the degradation and rebuilding of the formations. Since his day 

 the students of stratigraphical geology have universally acknowledged that in the 

 study of present geographical causes lies the key to the geological formations and 

 the inorganic world of the past. 



In this way the road was paved for Darwin and the doctrine of descent. The 

 aid which had been so ungrudgingly afforded by biology to geology was repaid by 

 one of the noblest presents ever made by one science to another. For the purposes 

 of geology, the science of bioloijy had practically completed a double demon- 

 stration : first, that the extinct life discernible in the geological formations was 

 linked inseparably with the organic life of the present ; and, second, that every 

 fossil recognised by the geologist was the relic of a creature that might well have 

 existed upon the surface of the earth at the present time. Geology repaid its 

 obligation to biology by the still greater twofold demonstration : first, that in the 



