300 PALEONTOLOGY. 



Prior to Hunter's time the main business of geology seems to have 

 been to discover the mode in which the terraqueous globe originated, 

 and to trace the effects of those cosmological causes which were con- 

 jectured to have been employed by the Author of Nature to bring this 

 planet out of a nascent and chaotic state into its present habitable 

 condition. 



Thus the philosopher Hooke, the contemporary, and, in some respects, 

 rival of Newton, who entertained ideas of the nature and instruct- 

 iveness of fossil organic remains far beyond his age, yet with a mind 

 biassed by the idea of the Mosaic universal deluge, writes in 1688, 

 " During the great catastrophe there might have been a changing of 

 that part which was before dry land into sea by sinking ; and of that 

 which was sea into dry land by raising, and marine bodies might have 

 been buried in sediment beneath the ocean in the interval between the 

 creation and the deluge." 



Woodward, Professor of Medicine, the founder of the Geological 

 Museum of the University of Cambridge, and the collector of the most 

 complete series of fossil organic remains of his time, mainly employed 

 the numerous and instructive facts at his command to support a cosmo- 

 logical hypothesis, according to which " the whole terrestrial globe 

 was taken to pieces and dissolved at the flood, and the strata to have 

 settled down from this promiscuous mass as any earthy sediment from 

 a fluid." 



After Woodward, succeeded Burnet, with his " Sacred Theory of the 

 Earth "(1690), in comparison with which, as Lyell truly remarks, "Even 

 Milton had scarcely ventured in his poem to indulge his imagination so 

 freely in painting scenes of the Creation and Deluge, Paradise and Chaos." 



A remarkable comet appeared in 1680, and gave rise to many specu- 

 lations on the nature and powers of those erratic celestial bodies, the 

 boldest and most systematic of which were pressed into the service of 

 geology, and made by Whiston the dynamical basis of his " New Theory 

 of the Earth." This, like the preceding cosmogonies, retarded the pro- 

 gress of truth, by diverting men from the investigation of the structure 

 and the fossils of the earth's crust, and by inducing them to waste their 

 time in speculations on the power of comets to drag the waters of the 

 ocean over the land, or condense the vapours of their tails into an over- 

 whelming deluge. 



To come nearer to the time of Hunter, we find that Bufibn had also 

 his " Theory of the Earth ; " but as he did not profess, with Burnet and 

 Whiston, to show that the explanation of geological phenomena and 

 fossil remains, according to the Mosaic cosmogony, was " perfectly 

 agreeable to reason and philosophy," the great naturalist received an 



