REPORT ON GEOLOGY, 
been recognised in Italy by Steno, and in France by Rouelle; and 
although Werner in his lectures, and Saussure as above quoted, 
appear to have indicated generally, that the laws of this distribu¬ 
tion bore a relation to the geological age of the formations con¬ 
taining them, yet a degree of vagueness hung over the whole 
subject, which precluded any extensive or useful application of 
this great principle, until the acute observations of Smith first 
brought it prominently forward in all the precision of exact de¬ 
tail as applied to a vast succession of formations, including the 
most important portion of the geological series; and as from his 
situation in life we must consider the discoveries of Smith as the 
extraordinary results of native and untaught sagacity of intellect, 
they must on this account be held to challenge a still warmer 
tribute of approbation, and may be regarded as strictly original 
in him, even where faint traces of anticipation may be found in 
Continental writings little likely to have fallen beneath his obser¬ 
vation. The third school, or that of Tertiary Geology, owes its 
foundation to the admirable Memoir on the Basin of Paris, pub¬ 
lished by Cuvier and Brongniart, 1811. Although this school 
was certainly subsequent in point of date to that of Smith, yet 
those who had already directed their attention to such pursuits at 
this period, must well remember that the Wernerian school of 
primitive and mineralogical geology having previously obtained 
an undisputed and exclusive ascendancy in the minds of most 
of those who possessed any influential station in the scientific 
world, the observations of the individual alluded to had little 
chance of recommending themselves at first to public notice, 
and that in fact the knowledge of them appears to have been 
for ten years chiefly confined to a small circle in the neighbour¬ 
hood of Bath,—until the high scientific distinction of Cuvier, 
and the striking and interesting nature of the facts developed 
in his brilliant Memoir, excited a marked sensation and com¬ 
manded the general attention of men of science ; for none such 
could peruse with indifference those masterly descriptions, which 
exhibited the environs of one of the great metropolitan cities 
of Europe as having been successively occupied by oceanic 
inundations and fresh-water lakes; which restored from the 
scattered fragments of their disjointed skeletons the forms of 
those animals, long extinct, whose flocks once grazed on the 
margins of those lakes; and which presented to our notice the 
case of beds of rock only a few inches in thickness, extending 
continuously over hundreds of square miles, and constantly 
distinguished by the same peculiar species of fossil shells. 
The public mind being thus fully awakened to a perception 
of the vast importance of zoological geology, as superadded to 
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