188 
WAYSIDE NOTES. 
SSitnsik Hates. 
Signs of the Times. —In the sermon preached by Dr. Boyd 
Carpenter, Bishop of Bipon, in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, 
in relation to Her Majesty’s Jubilee, before the Members of the 
House of Commons, on Sunday, 22nd May last, after referring 
generally to the progress of knowledge during the last fifty years, he 
said:—“ The age was not prosaic which had given us enlargement of 
knowledge and power, which had witnessed three discoveries, any of 
them equal to the discovery of the laws of motion—the discovery, he 
meant, of the doctrine of evolution, of the conservation of energy, 
and of the subtle molecular movement in the physical world, and 
which had given us Darwin and Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall, 
M‘Clintock, Stanley, Baker, and Speke; he did not call that age 
prosaic which had drawn men together in closer bonds, extended its 
enfranchising hand to every creed, stood with tenderer care to the 
needy and the unfortunate, cherished the fallen, provided for the 
insane, abolished duelling, and mitigated war ; which was the age of 
Florence Nightingale, of Sister Dora, of Agnes Jones, and Octavia 
Hill; which had shown us martyrs of science like Brewster and 
Professor Palmer; martyrs and heroes of the faith like Livingstone, 
Paterson, Hannington, and Moffat; heroes, too, of the battlefield that 
had left us records great and heart stirring, like the marches in 
Afghanistan, in Egypt, and the stories of Balaclava and Borke’s 
Drift.” The above extract is taken from the “ Times” newspaper of 
23rd May last, the editor of which characterised the sermon as 
being “remarkable for its power, its brilliancy, and its sustained 
eloquence.” 
The Death of Bernard Studer, of Berne, the Swiss geologist, at the 
ripe old age of ninety-three years, carries back our thoughts almost 
into the pre-historic period of geological theories. Ninety-three years 
ago the war between the Yulcanists and Neptunists, as the advocates 
respectively of universal volcanic and universal aqueous origin of 
rocks were known, still raged with hardly diminished fury, though 
the names themselves had hardly as yet become terms of reproach. 
Hutton had as yet only published in preliminary form his views, now 
known as the Huttonian theory of the earth, declaring that “the 
ruins of an older world are visible in the structure of our planet; and 
the strata, which now compose our continents, have been once beneath 
the sea, and were formed out of the waste of pre-existing continents,” 
variously modified by forces either mechanical or chemical, igneous or 
aqueous, and which forces are still existing and acting. Even William 
Smith, with whom British classificatory geology practically begins, 
had only two or three years before published his “ Tabular View of 
the British Strata ” (1790), and his great map was not published till 
more than a score of years after. Studer seems to have been the 
William Smith of Swiss geology, and his greatest work was the publi¬ 
cation, in conjunction with A. Escher von der Linth, of a geological 
map of Switzerland. Perhaps an equally high distinction is, however, 
to indicate him as one of the very first to study physical geography 
from the geological point of view. 
