Steno, in Padua, prof

of anatomy, compared the fo il teeth found in Italy with those of a recent shark, and demonstrated their close similarity. But Bernard Pali y, the potter, was, said Fontanelle, the first who dared a ert in Paris that fo il remains of shells and fishes had once belonged to living animals. Two centuries more were spent in an equally severe and obstinate struggle against the not le absurd doctrine that all the fo ils, which were now admitted to be of organic origin, had been buried by the deluge of Noah. Woodward, at Cambridge. conceived the whole terrestrial globe to have been taken to pieces and di olved at the flood, and the strata to have settled down from this promiscuous ma . Ray immediately exposed the fallacy of his argument, showing that heavy and light bodies are mingled in the same stratum. Thomas Burnet published his Sacred Theory of the Earth , 1681-89, containing an account of its origin and of all the changes which it will undergo until the consummation of all things. In it he showed how the crust of the earth had been fi ured at the deluge by the sun's rays, so that it burst, and the diluvial waters were let loose from a supposed central aby . Whiston followed in a similar style. Moro and Generelli in Italy advocated more rational views. "We must abandon," said they, "the doctrine, once so popular, which denies that organized fo ils were derived from living beings, and we cannot account for their present position by the theory of Strabo, or by the universal deluge as explained by Woodward; nor is it reasonable to call the Deity in capriciously upon the stage and make Him work miracles for the sake of confirming our preconceived hypothesis. I hold in utter abomination those systems which are built with their foundations in the air and cannot be propped up without a miracle." About 1700 Leibnitz propounded the doctrine of an original liquid globe, covered, after it had sufficiently cooled, with a universal ocean, a long and bold step in advance. Buffon followed him, explaining the formation of strata by the violent action of water. For some of his teachings he was summoned before the Faculty of Theology at Paris and requested to recant, which he did by adding to the next edition of his book these words: "I abandon everything in my book respecting the foundation of the earth, and generally all that may be contrary to the narration of Moses. Toward the end of the 18th century the chief event in the progre of geology was the beginning of the Neptuno-Plutonic IMG:content-0254.jpg:[graphic] IMG:content-0255.jpg:[graphic] Ideal landscape of the Devonian Period. controversy, during which for many years the advocates of water as the great geological agent waged fierce fight with those of the opposite school, who attributed nearly all the observed phenomena to the action of heat. (See WERNER and HUTTON). The right was partly on both sides. But while the champions were thus striving for the mastery, a single man, unaided by wealth or station, was doing more for the science than either of them. William Smith, an English surveyor, published in 1790 his Tabular View of the British Strata , in which he announced the doctrine that there was a definite order of succe ion in the strata, and that this order was never inverted. To this most important principle he added another equally novel and significant: that these strata could be recognized in different places by the fo ils which they contained. If Smith's first thesis contained the elements of systematic Geology, his second not le truly contained those of Paleon tology; to his work is due the setting of both sciences on a solid base for the first time. He has been justly called the Father of English Geology. civilized condition is now found to be older than the date previously a igned to his creation. All these victories over tradition and prejudice have placed Geology to-day among the foremost of the sciences. But other struggles are yet in progre , other victories almost in sight. The secret of the Highlands, revealed by fifty years of labor. tells us of shoves and thrusts in the crust that have transferred whole counties bodily from their former position, and thereby supplies us with a key to similar enigmas elsewhere. The conditions of the oceanic aby es, discovered by deep sea dredging. vations, and await the result at some future period, with the belief that the time was not yet come for a general system of geology. The wisdom of this course has been fully proved by the solid and enormous advance which the young science has made since it was freed from the visionary and the supernatural. A short account of its later succe es will show in strong contrast the progre of the present century. The work of William Smith was limited to the English Mesozoic rocks in his Tabular View. But in 1815 he pub. a geological map of England, the first ever constructed, which Ideal view of a marshy forest of the Coal Period. remains a lasting monument of original talent and extraordinary perseverance; for he had explored the whole country on foot without the guidance of previous observers or the aid of fellow laborers, and had succeeded in throwing into natural divisions the whole complicated series of British strata. Later geologists continued the work which he had begun, and the Carboniferous system was added to the geological column. The Devonian system followed, chiefly through the investigations of Miller in Scotland, and Murchison in England. The latter afterward defined the Silurian system in South Wales; the yet older strata below these were erected by Sedgwick into his Cam brian system. Later still the rocks overlying the Mesozoic were divided by Lyell into the Eocene, the Miocene, the Pliocene, and the Pleistocene, and the outline of the geological column was completed. Through the labors of these and other geologists in Britain and on the Continent the new science rapidly a umed a commanding position, and the name Geology displaced that of Mineralogy, under which it had previously been known. Swiftly it emerged from the contempt with which it had been regarded in consequence of its lowly origin and semi-fabulous ancestry. The visions of the past were dispelled by accurate observation and logical induction. PALEONTOLOGY (q.v.) gave powerful a istance in the work. Catastrophe and Cataclysm gradually disappeared, and the doctrine of Uniformity, preached by by Lyell at first to deaf ears, taught us to see in the past only the action of causes still real and potent in our own day. The short span of a few you sand years, within which the cosmogonists had attempted to compre the whole terrestrial and celestial history, gradually lengthened out into almost illimitable eras, where years gave place to millenniums. The conception of a readymade earth was supplanted by that of its evolution by slow and natural forces through countle centuries from a vaporous hazy ma of cloud. The nebular hypothesis, first formulated by Laplace, has become an accepted article of the scientific creed, and the liquefaction, solidification, and cooling of the planets have become the subjects of mathematical calculation. Life, too, which a few years ago was thought to have been first breathed on the Earth some sixty centuries before our day, is now seen running back into a past so distant that imagination fails to conceive it, and yet its beginning seems almost infinitely earlier still. The doctrine of the antiquity of man, more obstinately contested than all the preceding by the conservative, and especially by the theological schools, has itself been established on a basis too firm ever again to be overthrown; far from being a new-comer on the planet, man's manence and of the stability of the continental ma es. temperature and condition of the Earth's interior will probably long remain unknown. But even the problems connected with these do not appear to be now hopele ly out of reach. The complications of the Ice Age, the topic of keen and at times acrimonious discu ion, are gradually yielding under patient scrutiny, and one by one its almost hopele ly confounded threads are being disentangled. The microscope and the lapidary's wheel have been pre ed into the service, and by their aid we hope some day to read in the structure of the rocks the story of their formation, and to establish in Pre-Cam brian and even in Archæan strata some law of succe ion as valid as that afforded by fo ils in younger rocks. Moreover, the features of the Earth's surface. its physiography, so to speak, are made by close scrutiny to reveal their origin and to show the changes that have taken place in river systems by the gradual erosion of the land and the transfer of the waters from one basin to another. This is the new branch of Geomorphy. Extinct geographical outlines are being restored, and we are gradually becoming familiar with the geography of the past, with the continents, oceans. lakes, rivers, and seas of bygone rone ages. Geology is thus fulfilling her great purpose of giving us a complete physical record of Earth from the earliest times to the present. But far from being content even with this, she is pushing her researches into the future and anticipating changes yet to be, the outcome of the forces that have evolved the present from the past.