498 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



remained under a cloud of misapprehension and unbelief 

 for nearly a century, and it was reserved for the genius 

 of Charles Lyell, hardly more ihan fifty years ago, to lift 

 that veil and compel the thinking members of mankind 

 to recognise that geology is in effect the sum of the 

 countless geographies of the past, and that the geography 

 of our own time is merely the geology of the present. 



But it is only of very late years that the geographers 

 themselves have been willing to admit this fact and to 

 employ geological science in their own interpretation of 

 geographical phenomena. Xowadays, we are threatened, 

 however, with a flood of geographical literature coming 

 from their direction. Xow, simply because its inhabitants 

 speak a kind of geographical language, Lesley, Gilbert, 

 Suess, Penck, and Davis have shewn how in the matter 

 of mountain chains, plains, rivers and the coasts of the 

 present day we see in each and all a link in the unbroken 

 chain of geological cause and effect. What was, a few 

 years ago, to the geographer a geographical phenomena, 

 to be accepted merely as a topographical fact and nothing 

 else, becomes endowed with interest and with life, when 

 it is shewn in this way to be a passing phase in the 

 unbroken course of geographical evolution. But I am 

 still of the opinion that much of what is written is beyond 

 the grasp of the average geographer. For the proper 

 study and appreciation of this so-called branch of geo- 

 graphical science, a knowledge of the principles and the 

 practice of stratigraphical geology is absolutely 

 indispensable. 



At the present day the science of geology is entering 

 upon its fourth and highest stage, in which the science 

 of physics, or natural philosophy, is destined to play the 

 most important part. Xow that the general distribution 

 and characters of the great geological formations have 



