326 Life Changes on the Globe. 



mense, and incalculable, ages of the past. The natural arrange- 

 ment of various strata necessitated the idea that some were 

 ancient, and others comparatively new. The same fact of se- 

 quence in formation was testified by their structure, some 

 being obviously composed of materials obtained from those of 

 earlier date; but the various leaves of the great earth-book 

 would have been comparatively blank pages, if they had not 

 been written over with the hieroglyphic characters of once 

 living beings. It was soon found that fossils, which some 

 early observers thought to have been only freaks of Nature's 

 " plastic power," were the most important records of terrestrial 

 modification. Particular kinds were ascertained to have been 

 connected with particular periods of the history of any locality 

 which presented a succession of forms. Up to a certain point 

 similar remains were discovered in analogous formations in 

 different countries, and it was assumed that we were thus in 

 possession of the means of establishing a comparative chronology 

 universally applicable in our mundane world. The age, for 

 example — giving geological latitude to the word — of Silurian 

 slates and sandstones, coal measures, or chalk, was supposed 

 to be the same all over the globe. If the characteristic fossils 

 were found, they were presumed to decide the epoch to which 

 the strata belonged, and few geologists, even in the recesses of 

 their own minds, ventured to question the dogmas of a scien- 

 tific orthodoxy which were not without convenience in appli- 

 cation, and which were widely received. To Professor Huxley 

 belongs the honour of boldly assailing the ground of this 

 belief, and of recalling the whole tribe of stratigraphical deci- 

 pherers to a just consideration of the wide distinction between 

 facts arrived at through the genuine processes of inductive or 

 deductive investigation, and the various fancies and figments 

 by which men delude themselves into the notion that their 

 knowledge extends to regions which in reality their inquiries 

 have failed to reach. 



Human egotism has been at the bottom of many speculative 

 errors, and man has too often tried to dwarf the universe so as 

 to bring it within the limits of his feeble faculties, and make 

 its operations correspond in brevity of duration with the short- 

 ness of his mortal life. It is to this source that we owe many 

 follies of cosmogony and geology, aud it is very rarely that 

 even the professed investigators of science can be induced to 

 forego the idle effort to explain the history of our planet by 

 theories prodigal in violence and parsimonious in time. From 

 ail such blunders English geologists, at least, might have easily 

 emancipated themselves if they had followed to their legitimate 

 conclusions the principles established by Sir Charles Lyell in 

 his masterly examination of the connection between past facts 



