EEYIEW. 



437 



Professor Owen, addressing his audience at the College of Surgeons on 

 March lOth, 1855, on this subject, said, — 



"The close similarity, in the clear and philosophical views and words of 

 Fracastoro, to tliose of Hunter (who we may safely ])elieve had never read, 

 or probably heard of the Italian author), are vciy striking. I need not 

 trespass on your time by recounting the hundredfold additional and diver- 

 sified testimony, which God, in his wisdom, has suffered to be made mani- 

 fest, and to be irresistible in producing conviction according to the means 

 of appreciating truth with w hich He has been pleased to endow the human 

 understanding, in demonstrating the utter inadequacy of any of the brief 

 and transient traditional deluges to account for observed geological and 

 palccontological plienomena. 



"As the astronomer in teaching his science gives the results of the ex- 

 ercise of those faculties of observation, comparison, and calculation which 

 have been given to him for the purpose of making known the creative 

 operations in infinite space, without enlisting any aid or element of science 

 from the records of Creation in the sacred history of the Jews, so ought 

 the naturalist or geologist equally to abstain from any foregone conclusion 

 as to mode or time of operation which he might believe himself able to 

 derive from divine teachings given for another end. He ought to confine 

 himself to the deductions which rest on observation and experiment, and 

 to teach those natural truths only which he has been privileged to establish 

 by the exercise of the talents entrusted to him for the discovery of the 

 creative operations, or the power of God, in the immeasurable periods of 

 the past. 



We find in the remarkable essay recovered from his posthumous 

 manuscripts some instances of the results of the special apphcation of 

 those principles to particular geological phenomena. 



" Take those \\ liich must have most frequently presented themselves to 

 his observation, as e. (j. in the valley of the Thames, and note the broad 

 interpretation that he gives of the facts so observed. ' Probably,' he 

 writes, 'the whole flat tract of the river Thames, between its lateral hills, 

 was an arm of the sea ; and as the German Ocean became shallower, it 

 was gradually reduced to a river : and the composition of this tract of 

 land, for an immense depth, would show it, viz. a gravel, a sand, and a 

 clay, with fossil shells in the clay 200 or 300 feet deep, all deposited when 

 it was an arm of the sea, and above which are found the bones of land- 

 animals, where it has been shallow.' " — P. xv. 



Owen goes on to say, — 



" Hunter does not, indeed, specify the nature of the shells : they are, 

 however, of a kind that could leave no doubt on his mind of their marine 

 character. With his fossil specimen of Stromhus coronatus, Dfr., he has 

 placed the recent Slromhus accipilr'inus from the South American seas. 

 He had also obtained Bosiellaria macro})! era, Lam., from the eocene 

 tertiary at Hordwell, Hants. ; Valuta nodosa, Sby., from the London clay ; 

 Milra elou()((ia. Lam., from the eocene at Grignon, near Paris ; the gigantic 

 CerithiHUi, from the same formation and locality ; the Crassatella tumida, 

 L)h., from Nummulitic strata of the Swiss Alps ; and the great Nautilus 

 imperialis from Sheppey, so like the pearly Nautilus froni the Indian 

 seas. All these shells, selected from a hundred other specimens in Hunter's 

 cabinet, must have presented to their collector unmistakeable features of 

 the marine origin of the strata containing them. 



" Subsequent researches, aided by the refined eonchology of mo^lcrn 

 science, have established the truth of Hunter's conclusion. 



" All the shells of the Fioudon clay which forms the bottom of the tract 



