they get hold of a few. They wish to put them at once into the form 
of a theory. Men acquire a greater reputation, as they suppose, from 
inventing theories than from carefully examining and tabulating facts. The 
real benefactors of science are the slow accumulators of facts, and not the 
inventors of theories ; and that is shown throughout the whole course of 
geology. The facts of the last fifteen or twenty years have almost entirely 
annihilated the theories of the previous twenty years. Any one who studies 
the exceptional character and history of geology must arrive at that con- 
clusion, and I think that some such feeling as that has been present in 
Mr. Pattison’s mind, for I find he most carefully avoids, as far as he possibly 
can, those theories which are now exploded in geology, but which have been 
lying at the foundation of it, as we may say, for the last quarter of a century. 
How did geology take its origin as a science ? It took its origin as a science 
from the power of observation of Mr. Smith, the eminent first English 
geologist, to whom even the continents generally have to give the palm as 
the founder of the science. How did he found his quasi-science of geology ? 
From the fossil remains of certain strata which enabled him to identify those 
strata in other parts of the country. He was exceeedingly well acquainted 
with the nature of certain strata throughout England, and when taken into 
museums in different places, he astonished the collectors of fossils by being 
able to say : “ You found that fossil in such a stratum, and you found that 
one in such another.” The being able to identify the fossils from the various 
strata in which they were discovered, and vice versa, was soon formed into a 
theory ; there being so many strata, there must have been so many different, 
series of creations that lay at the bottom of all ancient geology, as we may 
call it. Every distinct stratum was marked as a distinct creation. Take 
that catalogue of strata given by Professor Haughton, and which Mr. Pat- 
tison gives in his 37th paragraph. You have the Eozoic stratum, thousands 
of feet thick ; the lower Silurian, so many more thousands ; and a long list 
of other strata. Each of those strata has a different series of animals peculiar 
to itself ; so that, given a certain animal, you at once identify its stratum. 
You hear and read about the cretaceous stratum, nearly all chalk, with a 
little silica mixed with it ; the carboniferous stratum ; the sandstone stratum ; 
and so on. And now you begin to think that there are certain chemical or 
lithological characteristics of strata. Now, I have been present at discussions 
among the most eminent authorities on geology, and I have heard them give 
up all idea of anything like a lithological arrangement of strata. There is no 
identification of strata at all according to their lithological character, but 
only according to their paleozoic character. Given the fossils the animal 
or vegetable remains in the stratum- and you can identify not only the 
stratum from which those fossils are derived, but its age in the . earth s history 
That was a certain hypothesis which was a very good solution of a certain 
number of facts as they were then accumulated, but how have the facts 
changed ? It has been found that there is not that paleozoic distinction 
between the strata which was at first asserted. The first thing which we 
were then told was that there was a part of one stratum penetrating the 
