2 
METHODS OF THEORIZING IN GEOLOGY. 
[Ch. I. 
example, whether a shell was really a shell, — whether sand and 
pebbles were the result of aqueous trituration, — whether stra- 
tification was the effect of successive deposition from water; 
and a thousand other elementary questions which now appear 
to us so easy and simple, that we can hardly conceive them to 
have once afforded matter for warm and tedious controversy. 
In the first volume we enumerated many prepossessions 
which biassed the minds of the earlier inquirers, and checked 
an impartial desire of arriving at truth. But of all the causes 
to which we alluded, no one contributed so powerfully to give 
rise to a false method of philosophizing as the entire uncon- 
sciousness of the first geologists of the extent of their own 
ignorance respecting the operations of the existing agents of 
change. 
They imagined themselves sufficiently acquainted with the 
mutations now in progress in the animate and inanimate world, 
to entitle them at once to affirm, whether the solution of certain 
problems in geology could ever be derived from the observa- 
tion of the actual economy of nature, and having decided that 
they could not, they felt themselves at liberty to indulge their 
imaginations, in guessing at what might be, rather than in in- 
quiring what is; in other words, they employed themselves in 
conjecturing what might have been the course of nature at a 
remote period, rather than in the investigation of what was the 
course of nature in their own times. 
It appeared to them more philosophical to speculate on the 
possibilities of the past, than patiently to explore the realities 
of the present, and having invented theories under the influence 
of such maxims, they were consistently unwilling to test their 
validity by the criterion of their accordance with the ordinary 
operations of nature. On the contrary, the claims of each new 
hypothesis to credibility appeared enhanced by the great con- 
trast of the causes or forces introduced to those now developed 
in our terrestrial system during a period, as it has been termed, 
of repose. 
Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, 
pa 
