350 
THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE GEOLOGICAL 
RECORD. 
By DAVID FORBES, F.R.S., &c. 
T HE term Geology, which signifies the science of the earth, 
being derived from the two Greek words, Ti}, “ the 
earth,” and Aoyos*, “ a word or argument,” has been variously 
interpreted by different writers on the subject.* During the 
last generation, geology, as a science, was studied altogether 
from a purely mineralogical and physical point of view; an 
interpretation which became completely reversed when the 
introduction of paleontology, called in as an aid to its study, 
so absorbed the attention of the majority of geologists, to the 
exclusion of almost all other branches of the science, that most 
of the later works on geology, especially here in England, may 
be regarded rather as histories of the development of life upon 
our globe than treatises on its geology in its more extended 
sense. 
A perusal of most, even of our best-known manuals of geo- 
logy, will show that their contents are almost entirely devoted 
to the fossiliferous strata, commencing their descriptions either 
with the most recent formations, and proceeding backwards 
until they stop at those more ancient ones, in which only 
traces of organic remains have as yet been discovered ; or vice 
versa , beginning with the lower Silurian or Cambrian rocks or 
in later years (since the discovery of that most perplexing 
organism the Eozoon Canadense) with the Laurentian forma- 
tion, and treating the others in ascending order up to the 
present time : a system, which in either case makes the stu- 
dent feel the evident want of a beginning or first chapter in 
the geological record, whilst at the same time it imposes, as it 
were, a dictatorial boundary to his field of research in a similar 
manner to what it would be, if he was told, when studying 
* Including the strangely inappropriate application of the term by M. 
Meunier, who writes of the u Geology of the Heavens ! ” and has lately pub- 
lished a work entitled u Le Ciel g^ologique.” Paris, 1871. 
