EEYTEW. 
437 
Professor Owen, addressing his audience at tlie College of Surgeons on 
March lOth, 1855, on this subject, said, — 
" The close similarity, in the clear and philosophical views and words of 
Pracastoro, to those of Hunter (who we may safely believe had never read, 
or probably heard of the Italian author), are very 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 which 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 
palseontological phenomena. 
" 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 application of 
those principles to particular geological phenomena. 
" Take those A^ hich must have most frequently presented themselves to 
his observation, as e. g. 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 Stromhus accipitrinus from the South American seas. 
He had also obtained Rostellaria macroptera, Lam., from the eocene 
tertiary at Hordwell, Hants. ; Voluta nodosa, Sby., from the London clay ; 
Mitra elongata, Lam,, from the eocene at Grignon, near Paris ; the gigantic 
Cerithium, from the same formation and locality ; the Crassatella tumida, 
Dh., from Nummulitic strata of the Swiss Alps ; and the great Nautilus 
imperialis from Sheppey, so like the pearly ISTautilus from 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 conchology of modern 
science, have established the truth of Hunter's conclusion. 
" All the shells of the London clay which forms the bottom of the tract 
