Proceedings of the British Association, 135 



what was said : — With regard to Dr. Buckland's ' Bridgewater 

 Treatise', I believe that his account of the successive changes by 

 which the earth has been brought to its present state, substantially 

 represents facts. His account of the original nebulous condition of the 

 earth, is not a wild conjecture, but a probability, suggested by the 

 phenomena of the heavens. We know that at the present day the 

 whole globe is composed of a few elementary substances, taking 

 either a solid, fluid, or vapoury form, and that by an increase of 

 temperature such as we believe to have once existed, they would all 

 be reduced to the last of these conditions. The condensation of 

 such a mass of incandescent vapour by the radiation of its heat, 

 might form a shell or crust about a liquid centre ; but he neither 

 says that all the solid matter was granite, nor that all the liquid was 

 rain-water. Dr. Buckland proceeds to state that this shell would be 

 composed of granitic and kindred rocks ; that is to say, rocks of 

 crystalline structure ; not stratified, or arranged in laminae, by the 

 force of gravitation acting on particles held in suspension in a fluid 

 and spread out by currents. Now, it is a fact, that all the lowest 

 rocks with which we are acquainted have some such character. It is 

 true they contain but a small per-centage of carbonate of lime, and 

 some other constituents of the strata formed upon them, but these 

 may have been derived from the waters that covered them, or the 

 interior of the globe ; for in such a mass who shall say what are the 

 elements within ? Sir Humphrey Davy supposed the interior of the 

 earth to be the reservoir of the metallic bases of the earths ; and as 

 the cooling of the earth must have been attended with a diminution 

 of bulk, this crust would inevitably be broken and corrugated, and 

 the fluid contents of its interior from time to time forced out. The 

 objection which the Dean of York has taken to the truth of our tables 

 of the superposition of the strata, is founded on a total misconception of 

 the nature of our investigation, and of the facts of the case. No stratum 

 can be universal, any more than the sea, in which it was formed can be 

 supposed to have been universal ; and as the sea has always been shift- 

 ing its boundaries, it follows necessarily, that in some places certain 

 terms of the series will be wanting, and a formation of high antiquity 

 be overlaid by one of much more modern date. The sections given 

 by Mr. Murchison only show the strata which appear in the actual 



