Cxlii PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



his characteristic zeal for science, has not only applied his own 

 mental resources towards the advancement of the instructional ob- 

 jects of the institution, and his skill in various analyses, but out of 

 his ovni private funds has provided an assistant, and paid for many 

 other expenses of the Laboratory. He has delivered a course of 50 

 lectures on metallurgy, and 6 evening-lectures on metals, to working 

 men. Surely there is in this statement proof of a zeal and ability 

 which cannot be overrated, cannot be overpaid ; and it may well be 

 expected that a people so remarkable as the English people are for 

 sound common sense, will not fail to perceive, and to express their 

 conviction founded upon that perception, that the Museum of Prac- 

 tical Geology is an institution for the people, and deserving therefore 

 of their support. 



Let me now close my address by a few observations necessarily 

 occurring to my mind, as the result of these investigations. First, 

 then, it appears to me, we are steadily progressing towards a know- 

 ledge of the material structure of the crust of the earth, and of the 

 modifications it has undergone in the long course of ages ; and such 

 a knowledge seems essential to the right appreciation of many of 

 the phsenomena connected with the variations in the fauna and flora 

 of the surface of the earth. In regard to the natural history of the 

 earth, every day produces new genera and new species in every great 

 section of geological formations ; and yet this new evidence does 

 not appear to approximate these sections together, or to bind them 

 more into one great whole, so long as the test applied be identity of 

 species, though unquestionably, if all the formations be taken together, 

 every new discovery seems to supply a link, and to bring the or- 

 ganic elements of formations, widely apart as to time, into connexion 

 as parts of one great and harmonious organic system. How then 

 are we to account for this separation in time of the elements of a 

 creation ? Are we still, with Cuvier, to suppose that it has resulted 

 from successive destructions of a partially constructed creation and 

 successive renewals, each new creation supplying deticiencies in the pre- 

 ceding one, but producing others by leaving out some of the elements 

 of the last •, the creations, therefore, remaining imperfect ? Or are we 

 to suppose, with Blainville, that the work of creation was originally 

 complete, and that the gaps now visible are due to the gradual 

 dropping-out of certain of the links in the course of countless ages ? 

 Or are we to consider, with Lamarck and many others, that the pre- 

 sent is only the development, through various successive stages, of 

 the past, and that the limits of possible variation and transmutation 

 of species, either by imperceptible steps of gradation or by periodic 

 and sudden changes, regulated by the original law of creation, have 

 not yet been determined? To one or other of these theories we 

 must necessarily recur, and so far as the wisdom and power of the 

 Great Creator are concerned, neither can augment or diminish it ; for, 

 admitting that creative power must have been exercised, it is indif- 

 ferent whether it acted in the mode of Cuvier, or in that of Blain- 

 ville, or in that of Lamarck. In every case the image of the whole 

 must have been in the creative mind, and the wisdom equal, whe- 



