208 



records of our labours-], a critical eye may perhaps sometimes discover 

 that the modesty of our facts is but ill assorted with the boldness of 

 our conclusions. 



I should have been well content to have ended with these general 

 censures. But during the past year there has been sent forth, by 

 one of our own body, " a New System of Geology, in which the great 

 revolutions of the earth and of animated nature are reconciled at once 

 to modern science and to sacred history :" and to this title I will 

 venture to add, — in which the worst violations of philosophic rule, by 

 the daring union of things incongruous, have been adopted by the 

 author from others, and at the same time decorated by new fan- 

 tasies of his own. I shall not stop to combat the bold and unautho- 

 rized hypothesis, that all the successive formations of the old schistose 

 rocks were called into being simultaneously by a fiat of creative 

 power anterior to the existence of creatures possessing life : nor 

 shall I urge, that among these primitive creations of the author, 

 are mountain masses of rock formed by mechanical degradation from 

 rocks which preceded them, and beds of organic remains, — placed 

 there, if we may believe his system, in mere mockery of our senses; — 

 neither shall I detain you by dwelling upon the errors and contra- 

 dictions which are scattered through the early pages of his volume. 

 On this part of the " New System" all criticism is uncalled for here ; 

 for it soars far above us and our lowly contemplations. Its charac- 

 ter is written, and its very physiognomy appears in that dignified 

 and oracular censure which he himself has quoted from the works 

 of Bacon : " Tanto magis heec vanitas inhibenda venit et coercenda, 

 quia ex divinorum et humanorum male-sana admixtione, non so- 

 lum educitur philosophia phantastica, sed etiam religio hasretica." 

 " This vanity merits castigation and reproof the more, as from the 

 mischievous admixture of divine and human things, there is com- 

 pounded at once a fantastical philosophy and an heretical reli- 

 gion." 



All these things, Gentlemen, I shall pass over ■ but the author has 

 stood forward as the popular expositor of the present state of secon- 

 dary geology 3 of that very portion of our science, which has for 

 so many years employed the best efforts of our Society. This part 

 of the work appears not to contain one original fact, or the result 

 of one original investigation : and of this we do not complain. We 

 have, however, a right to look to it for information which shall not 

 repeat exploded errors ; but shall make a near approach to the level 

 of recent observations. But is this the case in the work before us ? 

 Unquestionably not. All the old errors in the arrangement of the 

 English strata, between the chalk and the oolites, are unaccountably 

 repeated; — errors which have been corrected since 1824, in our 

 Transactions, in English and Scotch philosophical journals, and in 

 various independent works of natural history ; and have excited, du- 

 ring the last five or six years, more discussions in this room than 

 have arisen out of any other part of secondary geology. Other anti- 

 quated errors, of like kind, have found a place of refuge in the pages 

 of this " New System." 



