180 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



the sun shone for ever in the backward Past ? Certainly not ! "Will 

 it light up for ever in the endless future the vast and glorious space 

 its beams illumine now ? Perhaps not. The sun may go out — it 

 may be millions of years to come ere it does, but its light may some 

 day be darkened. It is a long time to look forward to when that will 

 happen, we admit, and the race of man may pass away like the many 

 life-races of the Past, long before the bright rays of that " glorious 

 orb" begin to fade. But change is everywhere ; we see it in every- 

 thing around us ; we read the record of change everywhere and on 

 everything in the Past. The first land, so far as we can make out, 

 differed from our dry land now ; the first plants differed from those 

 that clothe the dry land now ; the first living creatures differed from 

 the animated beings around us. Pish, flesh, nor fowl put on the 

 same bodies ; perhaps even air and ocean differ. How, then, were the 

 planets weighed to a grain and forbidden to increase ? Were their 

 distances measured off to a millimetre, and the irrevocable order 

 passed, " Nearer shalt thou not approach, further shalt thou not recede 

 from the burning sun" ? For the sun was the edict passed, " Without 

 increase or waste, burning shalt thou go on for ever and ever" ? 

 Such an edict would make the sun an eternal creator of force. And 

 no one believes in creation except from God. Who but He, in the 

 incomprehensible beginning of all things, created the first atom of 

 force, and has gone on unceasingly multiplying force upon force ever 

 since ? 



It is well even in this world now and then to go out of the beaten 

 paths and to explore new lands — if even the result be only to con- 

 vince us of the value of the old ones. It i3 well, too, in science now 

 and then to diverge on to the realms of speculation — if even only to 

 attain a conviction of the accuracy of that which has been accepted. 

 At one time we had too much of speculation and too little of facts, 

 but in the advancing sciences of late, perhaps we have had too many 

 facts and too few speculations. Bricklayers would make of bricks 

 but a poor edifice if the architect had not imagined the building 

 beforehand. We all know how Physical Geology, as a science, is 

 looked at in the ordinary way ; and no one who looks closely at 

 the picture presented for our acceptance as the portraiture of what 

 was, what has been, and w'hat has happened, but must think that 

 the picture offered has many flaws. The artists claim pre-Ea- 

 phaelite minuteness and correctness in its execution ; they profess to 

 have studied facts, and to have built their picture up scene by scene, 

 leaf by leaf, texture for texture. We do not condemn their pre- 

 Raphaelite painting; but we claim the artist's right to let our fancy 

 loose, and to sketch out imaginary pictures of our own. 



Let those who have gone before us claim veracity for their depic- 

 tions, we ask only that ours may be looked upon as fanciful scenes ; 

 but if in our visionary sketchings the tracery of truthful expression 

 be detected, do us then the justice to let that be treasured and pre- 

 served. Our task is not to upset an old school and found a new, but 

 to seek out Truth. 



