62 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



years and ten, has laboured for inconceivable millioDS of years in the 

 fashioning and perfecting of out world — even the senseless winds 

 and waters seem to have joined in effort with the other more subtle 

 powers in the general progress and elaboration of its strocture. 



Deep down below, covered by a thousand feet of stone — so modem 

 borings have tanght ns — are the ancient mountain ridges of the primitive 

 world. Deep down below, in their mysterious plutonism, are the 

 crystalline primordial granites, and stacked above them are the ponder- 

 ous stony records of the past creations and ages. Deep down below, 

 and far back into time, must the mind by perception penetrate when it 

 begins to study the order of the rocks ; and, without inculcating some- 

 thing of the knowledge of the regularity of their succession, and the 

 catastrophes by which that succession has been variously interrupted 

 at particular times and places, how could we hope, when we opened and 

 read from the great historical folios of those creations, which for ever 

 have passed away, that our words would be intelligible or understood ? 



Much as is known of the rocks themselves, much yet remains to be 

 discovered : there are wide fields yet to be trodden, wide gaps in our 

 investigations yet to be filled up. Theories and systems are after all but 

 the exposition of the existing knowledge of the time, and the prevalent 

 ideas of one age have been deemed to be folly and ignorance in another. 

 Men's inferences may have changed, but the facts remain ; and every 

 year is bringing us nearer and nearer to the truth, however far we may 

 be, notwithstanding all our advance, from a full knowledge of all the 

 laws of nature. Those laws have ever been the same, before even the 

 great foundation-stone was laid on which the superstructure of the 

 fossiliferous rocks has since been raised. 



All soils or earths — rocks, as they are technically called — are divided 

 into two classes or groups ; the one stratified or in layers (strata) and 

 mochunically deposited by water from the degradation or waste of pre- 

 existing mineral substances ; the other igneous, that is fire-formed or 

 fire-altered, such as volcanic lavas and granite. An intermediate class, 

 the metamorphic, is produced where the former or aqueous beds have 

 boon brought into contact with the latter— the heat of the one having 

 clinnged the characters of the other— in the vicinity of, and often to 

 some considerable distance from, the point of junction. The heat has 

 nlso destroyed or obliterated, to a greater or less degree, the traces of 

 organized fossils. 



