14 Featherstonhaugh''s Geological Report. 



geolog}' comprehends only the study of the mineral structure 

 of rocks, their relative position, and the fossils imbedded in 

 them. Restricted to these branches, this study, however 

 useful it might be, could not rise to the dignity of a science. 

 The origin of mountains and valleys, the changes of the bed 

 of the ocean, the action of rivers, and the nature of volca- 

 noes, together with the highly liberal study of comparative 

 anatomy, might be overlooked in this narrow field of observa- 

 tion, and with them all those lofty philosophical views of the 

 harmony of nature, by the aid of which geology may claim 

 to be considered as opening the avenues to all the branches 

 of natural science. 



An individual may be supposed whose mind had never 

 before been awakened to this subject, and contemplating for 

 the first time the varied nature of the surface of the earth, 

 the sublime height of the mountains, the profound valleys, 

 the extensive prairies without hills or vales, the oceans, lakes, 

 and rivers, with the thousand irregular beauties which give 

 so much grace to the face of nature. Yet might this super- 

 ficial aspect awaken no more enlarged idea than that the 

 earth was a confused mass of rocks, and clays, and sands, as- 

 sembled without order or design. At the sea-shore, how- 

 ever, where the rocks are often worn down to mural escarp- 

 ments,* and the beach is usually covered with shingles or 

 rounded pebbles, he could not fail to perceive that these last 

 had been brought into that state by mutual trituration from 

 water, and had thus been divested of the angular form they 

 had when first broken oflf from the parent mass, where they 

 once were, in the language of geologists, in situ^ or in place. 

 These would at once remind him of the rounded pebbles of 

 a similar character found on the dry land, almost universally, 

 and often at a great elevation above the level of the sea, in 

 many instances thousands of feet above the marine level. 



* Perpendicular sections resembling walls. 



