2 <c< METKoWciF THEORIZING IN GEOLOGY. [Ch. I. 



example, whether a shell was really a shell, whether sand and 

 pebbles were the result of aqueous trituration, whether stra- 

 tification was the effect of successive deposition from water; 

 and a thousand other elementary questions which now appear 

 to us so easy and simple, that we can hardly conceive them to 

 have once afforded matter for warm and tedious controversy. 



In the first volume we enumerated many prepossessions 



which biassed the minds of the earlier inquirers, and checked 



an impartial desire of arriving at truth. But of all the causes 



to which we alluded, no one contributed so powerfully to give 



1 rise to a false method of philosophizing as the entire uncon- 



j sciousness of the first geologists of the extent of their own 



/ ignorance respecting the operations of the existing agents of 



change. 



They imagined themselves sufficiently acquainted with the 

 mutations now in progress in the animate and inanimate world, 

 to entitle them at once to affirm, whether the solution of certain 

 problems in geology could ever be derived from the observa- 

 tion of the actual economy of nature, and having decided that 

 they could not, they felt themselves at liberty to indulge their 

 imaginations,, in guessing at what might be, rather than in in- 

 quiring what is; in other words, they employed themselves in 

 conjecturing what might have been the course of nature at a 

 remote period, rather than in the investigation of what was the 

 course of nature in their own times. 



It appeared to them more philosophical to speculate on the 

 possibilities of the past, than patiently to explore the realities 

 of the present, and having invented theories under the influence 

 of such maxims, they were consistently unwilling to test their 

 validity by the criterion of their accordance with the ordinary 

 operations of nature. On the contrary, the claims of each new 

 hypothesis to credibility appeared enhanced by the great con- 

 trast of the causes or forces introduced to those now developed 

 in our terrestrial system during a period, as it has been termed, 

 of repose. 

 \ Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, 



