146 Sir A. Oeikie — Lamarck and Flay fair — 



account of the important memoir in wbicli the illustrious Scottish 

 geologist, Button, bad then recently publisher! the first sketch of bis 

 "Theory of the Earth." On tlie other band, Hutton, by the 

 numerous references and citations in bis writings, showed how 

 closely he had studied and how generously he appreciated the 

 publications of his French contemporaries. 



Looking backward to the beginning of the nineteenth century, 

 we see the European geologists of that time ranged in two opposite 

 schools, which might be called hostile camps, that waged with each 

 other an animated and prolonged warfare. Not until after the chief 

 antagonists of that time had one by one passed away did the feud 

 finally die out. On the one side, the crowded ranks of the 

 Neptunists marched under a banner on which was boldly emblazoned 

 the war-cry of " Water." These militant theorists maintained, as 

 the cardinal article of their faith, that our globe was once surrounded 

 with an universal ocean, from whose waters the oldest rocks of the 

 terrestrial crust were successively deposited as chemical precipitates. 

 They scouted the notion that the earth possessed a highly heated 

 interior, and nicknamed as ' fii'e-philosophers ' those who held such 

 a belief. They contemptuously dismissed the idea that any of the 

 rocks of the crust had been erupted from below in a moltei;i 

 condition. They accounted for volcanoes by boldly reviving the 

 ancient hallucination that they were caused by the accidental 

 ignition of subterranean beds of coal. Hence as, on that supposition, 

 volcanic action could only have come into existence after vegetation 

 had flourished for a long time upon the surface of the earth, so as to 

 form there thick deposits of combustible materials, they affirmed 

 that the appearance of volcanoes must be a comparatively late 

 phenomenon in the history of our planet. They had not the least 

 conception of any source of energy lodged in the interior of the 

 earth. The broken and convoluted rocks of mountain - chains 

 awakened in these men no doubt of the fundamental truth of their 

 doctrine, for they complacently explained these stupendous structures 

 as nothing more than the natural result of the dessication, fissuring, 

 and subsidence of the universal aqueous deposits. 



On the other side of the field of battle, the phalanx of the 

 Plutonists or Vulcanists, less numerous but not less confident 

 and strenuous, proudly brandished their flag which bore the 

 watchword " Fire." With much more tolerance than was shown 

 by their opponents, these combatants freely admitted that a large 

 part of the earth's crust undoubtedly consists of materials that were 

 laid down in the sea. But they contended that the subsequent 

 uplifting of these materials into dry land and ranges of mountains 

 arose from the expansive power of heat within the globe. 

 Following Descartes and Leibnitz, they conceived that this intensely 

 hot interior was the source whence many crystalline rocks had been 

 forced upward into the cooler crust, and that from the same source 

 the activity of modern volcanoes is still derived. 



The dust and din of this warfare have long since subsided. 

 Looking back from the point at which we have now ai'rived in the 



