Art. XI. Notice of Professor Mitchill's Edition of Cuvier's Essay on the Theory of the Earth.
Art. XI. Notice of Professor Mitchill's Edition of Cuvier's Essay on the Theory of the Earth.
The American scientific public are under obligations to Professor Mitchill for bringing this book within their reach. It is one of the most eloquent, impressive, and instructive works on this grand but obscure subject, with which the world has ever been favoured. The reader is no sooner drawn within the current of Cuvier's eloquence, than he is borne along almost without the power or wish to escape. It is believed there are few intelligent and enlightened persons, whether geologists or not, who would fail to be gratified by a book which secures the understanding by a strict course of reasoning from facts, and delights the taste by a style bold, terse, and lucid, but at the same time rich and flowing.
The analysis of this work has been ably performed in Europe, and there is, therefore, the less necessity to attempt it here. While we take the liberty thus to recommend it, we do not hold ourselves strictly bound to the admission of every one of Cuvier's doctrines; and might, perhaps, wish that in a few instances he had been somewhat more explicit, or somewhat more qualified.
The additions by Professor Jameson, of Edinburgh, are valuable and interesting, and are retained in the present edition.
Those by Professor Mitchill will be perused with pleasure and advantage. The learned author has assembled, in one view, a great mass of facts, partly resulting from his own journeys and observations, and partly deduced from other respectable sources. We have no doubt that most of these facts will be considered by the scientific world as very interesting, whatever views they may entertain of the conclusions built upon them. The author has occupied himself principally upon those portions of the United States, which, by the organized remains both of animals and vegetables, with which they more or less abound, exhibit the most decisive and interesting evidence of changes and catastrophes, whose history is to be sought in the memorials entombed in the strata themselves.
We give no opinion regarding the theories of Professor Mitchill, not intending to review the work, but merely to aid, as far as in our power, in drawing the public attention to the interesting subjects about which it is occupied.
If we have any remark to add, it is, that an adherence to the technical precision with which most rocks are at the present day described, appears desirable in mineralogical and geological descriptions. When in the valuable additions before us we read of schorl rock, we gain only the idea of a rock containing that mineral; but as it occurs occasionally in several of the primitive rocks, we are at a loss which is intended; we believe it never forms a rock by itself. So with the slate rocks: there are several varieties of them—mica slate, clay slate, greenstone slate, &c. besides some subdivisions; and the mere word slate does not always give us the precise idea. But we are aware that, in the present case, it was less in view to go into all the details of geological description, than to give a view of our organized remains and of their supposed origin.