370 
SECOND REPORT -1832. 
Saussure in the Alps, of Palassou in the Pyrenees, and of Ardou- 
ino Ferber and Fortis in Italy, had at that time collected such 
a rich store of materials as required only the intervention of a 
compiler and digester to apply them at once to the purposes of 
a more comprehensive system. In a former publication, before 
referred to, I have endeavoured to show what England had con¬ 
tributed to this store; but I am happy to find that at the pre¬ 
sent moment this interesting subject is about to receive a much: 
fuller illustration from the pen of my friend Dr. Fitton*. 
The progress of geology from the period at which it thus 
began to assume the systematic character of a regularly digested 
science, may be considered as having presented three marked 
stages, distinguished by three successive schools ; each of these 
schools has selected for the more especial object of its atten¬ 
tion a single member of the three great geological divisions 
in the series of formations, i. e. the primitive, secondary, and 
tertiary; and the succession of these schools has, by a singular 
coincidence, followed the same order with that of the formations 
to which they were devoted: it may also be observed that the 
leaders of each school have been distinguished geologists of 
three different nations,—Germany, England, and France. The 
first, or German school, is that of Werner: this directed its 
attention principally to the primitive and transition formations f, 
in which the distinctions of mineralogical character assume 
the greatest importance; and the imbedded minerals, from their 
variety, and relations to the rocks containing them, become 
the chief objects of the geologist’s notice. The second, or En¬ 
glish school, has distinguished itself by the ardent and success¬ 
ful zeal with which it has developed the whole of the secon¬ 
dary series of formations: in these the zoological features of 
the organic remains associated in the several strata, afford 
characters far more interesting in themselves and important in 
the conclusions to which they lead, than the mineral contents 
of the primitive series. This school generally recognises the 
masterly observations of Smith, first made public in 1799, as 
those which have principally contributed to its establishment; 
although the regular distribution of organic remains had before 
* Now published in the 1st and 2nd vol. of the Lond. and Edin. Phil. Mag. 
f In the early works of one of the ablest British disciples of this school, whose 
meritorious labours undoubtedly contributed very largely to the diffiision of an 
ardour for geological inquiries in this island, there occurs a curious illustration 
of the exclusive attention to the older rocks. In the general view of geology con¬ 
tained in the Introduction to Professor Jamieson's Account of the Hebrides, 
1800, after a sufficiently full detail of the various primitive formations, we 
find the whole secondary group dismissed in these few vague words: “ They 
consist of limestone and argillite, with numerous petrifactions; also basalt, 
porphyry, pitchstone, greenstone, wacke, and the various coal strata.'’ 
