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Sir Charles Lyell, ever an active collector of geological facts, and an excellent writer on the science of Geology, has engaged with his usual zeal in verifying the researches of the French, Swiss, and German geologists, and has written a very readable book on these new revelations concerning the ancient history of the human race.
Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; he wasted none of his time in the inanities, stupidities and contradictions of theological metaphysics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the astronomy and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the Nineteenth Century.
The speculations of the supposititious Indian sage, though quite as sound as those of many a "Mosaic Geology," which sells exceedingly well, have no great value if we consider them by the light of modern science.
When engaged in 1828 in preparing for the press the treatise on geology above alluded to, I conceived the idea of classing the whole of this series of strata according to the different degrees of affinity which their fossil testacea bore to the living fauna.
Is it not more than royal wealth to have sun and frost, Gulf-stream and south-westers, laws of geology, phytology, physiology, and other ologies in a word, the whole universe and the powers thereof, day and night, paving, planting, roofing, lighting, colouring my winter-garden for me, without my even having the trouble to rub a magic ring and tell the genii to go to work? Yes.
The labor of the editors has been careful and conscientious; and they have produced a work which must long endure as a valuable contribution to American literature and a credit to American scholarship. Manual of Geology: treating of the Principles of the Science with Special Reference to American Geological History, etc. By JAMES D. DANA. 8vo. Philadelphia: Theodore Bliss & Co.
He made a collection of fossils unearthed in the trenches around Vicksburg, land and river shells from the Mississippi swamps, and a large collection of mosses while on detached duty in Illinois. He also familiarised himself with the geology of regions through which the armies passed to which he was attached.
But I of course want to be reading history as well, and that involves a good deal; physical geography, geology, &c., yet one things helps another very much. I don't work quite as methodically as I ought; and I much want some one to discuss matters with relating to what I read. I don't say all this, I am sure you know, as if I wanted to make out that I am working at grand subjects.
But by far the most impressive demonstration of the basic principle of geology employed for the determination of the relative ages of rocks is the mighty Cañon of the Colorado.
These assuredly are great and solid gains. But this is not all. Allied with geology, paleontology has established two laws of inestimable importance: the first, that one and the same area of the earth's surface has been successively occupied by very different kinds of living beings; the second, that the order of succession established in one locality holds good, approximately, in all.
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