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"The choice of suitable implements is not very great," I observed. "It is very limited, and most of them, such as a plasterer's pick or a geological hammer, are associated with certain definite occupations. You have a notebook?"
Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods.
That was the experience of all the workers in the west, and it brings plainly to view the great fact, of which not all, even of our best known geologists, are yet fully persuaded, that the geological record, though doubtless a unit, is not uniform over the whole country. These shackles thrown off, the geology of the west leaped up with a vigor which is astonishing.
First, he endeavours to prove that species may be originated by selection; secondly, he attempts to show that natural causes are competent to exert selection; and thirdly, he tries to prove that the most remarkable and apparently anomalous phaenomena exhibited by the distribution, development, and mutual relations of species, can be shown to be deducible from the general doctrine of their origin, which he propounds, combined with the known facts of geological change; and that, even if all these phaenomena are not at present explicable by it, none are necessarily inconsistent with it.
Since his retirement, Colonel Whittlesey has been leisurely engaged in scientific and literary pursuits, has again spent much time in geological explorations in the Lake Superior and Upper Mississippi country, has organized and brought into successful operation the Western Reserve Historical Society, of which he continues to be president, and has accumulated in its spacious hall a good collection of historical works relating to the West, and a rich collection of geological and antiquarian specimens, gathered in Ohio and the Northwest.
And as for the Major, instead of sitting down with such a man to dinner, what would he have done but drive him straightway from the door, and chase him to the utmost verge of his manor with the peak end of his "geological hammer?"
"Ah, that's more than any one of us can say; but I have seen their remains turned to stone, laid bare in a stone quarry that is to say, their skeletons, which show pretty well what must have been their shape; and if they existed once there is no reason why some of their descendants, though very rarely seen, may not still survive, though I am half afraid that my nephew here must have some half-forgotten lingering memories of one of these creatures that he has seen in some geological work, and upon seeing that fish or reptile let his imagination run riot and finished it off by memory."
The first and absolutely incontrovertible conclusion is that this theory of successive ages must be a gross blunder, in its baleful effects on every branch of modern thought deplorable beyond computation. But it is now perfectly obvious that the geological distinctions as to age between the fossils are fantastic and unjustifiable.
In accordance with this view it seems, if we turn to geological evidence, that organisation on the whole has advanced throughout the world by slow and interrupted steps. In the great kingdom of the Vertebrata it has culminated in man.
From the centre of that little world as primary, as the initiatory material, my perception of the world of fact widened and widened, by new sights and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions and histories, by guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest, my appetite for fact, grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of fact until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural History Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of Science, through a year of dissection and some weeks at the astronomical telescope.
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