The Timepiece of Geology. — Glaypole. 
41 
born. The dictum of Smith that fossil? were not strewn 
indiscriminately amongst the strata was proved to be true, 
and the geological world awoke to the fact that if these fos¬ 
sils were known the rock from which they came might be 
inferred with certainty. 
What coins and medals are to the numismatist and anti¬ 
quarian, fossils now became to the geologist. They were 
found to carry on their faces the dates of their creation. 
Then followed in succession the belief in a long succession of 
fossil faunas reaching back, one behind another, into the dis¬ 
tant ages of the past, to a remoteness that was startling by 
its antagonism to the current doctrines of the day. No idea 
of gradual transition had yet dawned. These faunas were 
looked upon as separate and independent. Each disappeared, 
if the thought on the subject had ever gone so far as this, in 
a world-wide catastrophe by the intervention of a deus ex 
'machina to remove it and it was followed by a new one brought 
in by recreative energy to take its place. No ancestral con¬ 
nection was imagined to explain the succession. Elie de 
Beaumont’s catastrophic geology was the geology of the time, 
and the story of life on this earth was a drama interrupted 
from time to time by the fall of the curtain and the shifting 
of the scenery. 
Slowly the evolutionary idea of genetic connection between 
these varied faunas took shape, and instead of a series of 
disjointed views a continuous picture was presented. Local 
disaster or gradual change succeeded to universal catastrophe 
and the uniformitarian school, with Lyell at its head, came to 
the foreground. It is not possible to overestimate the value 
of the contribution made to geological science by this new 
doctrine. Granting, as we may, that by some of Lyell’s fol¬ 
lowers it has been pushed to an excess, it nevertheless did 
more to set the science on a substantial footing than any 
other. Miracle and prodigy disappeared from the held and 
were succeeded by reason and logic. Baseless supposition 
and hne-spun theories gave place to a belief in the continuity 
of existing causes throughout the past and to a vast extension 
of that past beyond the widest limits previously assigned. 
Thus geologists gradually began to see in the so-called 
“curiosities” of the museums of fossil-hunting “cranks” a 
