Geology as a meafis of culture — A. Winchell. 103 
mist is conceivably in ihe condition of a gas. In a history of 
cooling, we have learned of no condition antecedent to this. 
The gaseous state of matter accompanies the highest tempera- 
ture know^n. Do not understand me as enunciating the doctrine 
that the cooling process must have begun at a temperature at 
which all terrestrial matter existed as a gas. I mean only, that 
the process of cooling leads always away from that state as the 
remotest possibility. Actually, it may have proceeded from a 
condition thermally subsequent to this. The subsequent ther- 
mal condition may have been attained from some older state in 
which the constituents of the world were gathering together, 
and were yet even at a low temperature. I am not seeking to 
reason out that condition of the world which was absolutely 
primordial. I seek only to illustrate how by an inverted de- 
duction, we may recede toward a state of the world which ante- 
dates all human observation and even all the rocky records of 
inductive geology. 
Now, having found a starting point — having assumed any 
remote condition as a starting point, we pursue by direct deduc- 
tion, the course of events which under the laws of matter, must 
have ensued in the progressive escape of heat from the terres- 
trial mass. We reason out the attainment, sooner or later, of 
the firemist condition, the precipitation of a molten rain and the 
growth of a molten globe, the condensation of aqueous vapor, 
the enveloping of the earth in a mantle of clouds, the descent 
of aeonic rains, and the gathering of the universal ocean. Many 
other events collateral with these, we logically reason out. By 
the aid of imagination, the scenes enacted become vivid and real, 
and our understanding of them improved. Now we see how 
and when marine precipitation must have begun, how the sub- 
marine floor by thickening, became melted off by encroachment 
of heat from below, and how as sedimentary deposits continued, 
the deep-seated residual heat invaded upward the earlier sea- 
sediments and transformed them. We see how and when the 
time arrived for the possible introduction of organic forms, and 
how they succeeded each other as the rolling aions of cooling 
wrought the terrestrial surface into changed conditions. Of all 
these post-crustal events, the crust has retained some records, 
and the inductive evidences from them check and verify our 
deductive inferences. 
