BOOK 1. 
COSMICAL ASPECTS OF GEOLOGY. 

Brerore geology had attained to the position of an inductive © 
science, it was customary to begin all investigations into the history _ 
of the earth by propounding or adopting some more or less fanciful — 
hypothesis in explanation of the origin of our planet, or of the 
universe. Such preliminary notions were looked upon as essential to — 
a right understanding of the manner in which the materials of the — 
globe had been put together. To the illustrious James Hutton (1785) 
geologists are indebted for strenuously upholding the doctrine that 
it is no part of the province of geology to discuss the origin of things. — 
He taught them that in the materials from which geological evidence _ 
is to be compiled there can be found “no traces of a beginning, no 
prospect of an end.” In England, mainly to the influence of the 
school which he founded, and to the subsequent rise of the 
Geological Society (1807), which resolved to collect facts instead of — 
fighting over hypotheses, is due the disappearance of the crude and 
unscientific cosmologies of previous centuries. Nea 
But there can now be little doubt that in the reaction against — 
those visionary and often grotesque speculations, geologists were 
carried too far in an opposite direction. In allowing themselves to 
believe that geology had nothing to do with questions of cos- 
mogony, they gradually grew up in the conviction that such questions 
could never be other then mere speculation, interesting or amusing 
as a theme for the employment of the fancy, but hardly coming 
within the domain of sober and inductive science. Nor would they 
soon have been awakened out of this belief by anything in their own 
science, It is still true that in the data with which they are accus- — 
tomed to deal, as comprising the sum of geological evidence, there — 
can be found no trace of a beginning, though there is ample proof of — 
constant, upward progression from some invisible starting-point. The — 
oldest rocks which have been discovered on any part of the globe have — 
probably been derived from other rocks older than themselves. 
Geology by itself has not yet revealed, and is little likely ever to 
reveal, a portion of the first solid crust of our globe. If then — 
