﻿Book Notices. 26^ 



Book Notice. 



The Earth and its Story : a First Book on Geology.— By Angelo 

 Heilprin ; pp. 267. Silver, Burdett & Company, New York, Boston 

 and Chicago, 1896. 



The story of our earth and the wonderful processes by which the 

 story is carried forward must, we think, have an increasing interest for 

 all thinking persons, as time goes on and the details of this wonderful 

 history are more and more clearly revealed. And this interest tinds its 

 cause not only on the fact that we, " Man, His last work," forms, as it 

 were, the denouement of the geological story, but also in the vastness of 

 the subject presented for consideration ; for " Geology," as was well 

 said by Herschel many years since, " in the magnitude and sublimity 

 of the objects of which it treats, undoubtedly ranks in the scale of 

 sciences next to astronomy." As the modern science of chemistry grew 

 upon and out of the quaint and curious experiments and speculations 

 of the astrologers, so geology had its foundation chiefly in the specula- 

 tions of the Italians of the 16th and 17th centuries, put forward to 

 account for two very remarkable facts ; first, namely, that the ocean 

 has undoubtedly in former times covered great tracts of country now 

 high above sea level, and secondly, that there exist in the rocky strata 

 of the earth's crust what are to all appearances the remains of animals 

 and plants. 



Looking back from the heights to which we have now attained these 

 curious speculations are full of interest. We feel that we have really 

 made some progress on finding the fossils of the earth's crust variously 

 explained as curious imitative forms produced by the influence of the 

 stars, as the products of a species of fermentation set up in the earth's 

 crust, or, finally, as the abortive and unsuccessful attempts on the part 

 of the Creator to fashion worlds, which as yet from lack of practice He 

 was unable to bring forth in beauty and perfection. 



As a science Geology can hardly be said to have existed more than a 

 century. It may be said to have really come into existence when the 

 truth of Hutton's fundamental principle became recognized that, 

 " In examining things present we have data from which to reason with 

 regard to what has been and from what actually has been we have data 

 for concluding with regard to that which is to happen hereafter"; a 

 principle which, when grasped and realized, afforded a key by which 

 the wonderful story of our planet could be deciphered with clearness 

 and certainty, and which also gave us for the first time some idea of 

 the immense aeons represented by the stratified rocks of the earth's 

 crust. For if, to take a single example, in the Carboniferous system of 

 Nova Scotia there is a thickness of three miles of strata, piled up upon 

 one another in regular order by the same processes which are now in 

 operation along the Atlantic coast, and which accomplish so very little- 



