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false classification, we find afterwards the means of translating them 
into the language of a true one. And the spirit of geological ob- 
servation 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 confess, indeed, for my own part, I do 
not look to see the exertions of the present race of geologists sur- 
passed by any who may succeed them. The great geological theo- 
rizers of the past belong to the Fabulous Period of the science ; but 
I consider the eminent men by whom I am surrounded as the Heroic 
Age of geology. They have slain its monsters, and cleared its wil- 
dernesses, and founded here and there a great metropolis, the queen 
of future 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 froin the heroic to the 
Historical Period. She can no longer look for supernatural suc- 
cesses, but she is entering upon a career, I trust a long and prosper- 
ous 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 Geolegy ;—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 suggest one 
or another hypothetical cause of change, without assigning the laws 
and amount of the change: it is hardly an advance even to calculate 
the results of our hypotheses on assumed conditions. 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 Geological 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 success in such matters ;—whether, not individuals 
only, not a generation alone, but whether the whole species be not 
too ephemeral, to penetrate, by the unassisted powers of its reason, 
into the mystery of its origin :—whether man, placed for a few cen- 
turies on the earth as in a school-room, have time to strip the wall 
