In fact this author says that:
"The Wernerians were as certain of the origin and sequence of the rocks as if they had been present at the formation of the earth's crust." (pp. 288-9.)
Here we see the family characteristics very strongly developed.
In speaking of Werner's five successive "suites" or onion-coats in which he wrapped his embryo world, Zittel complains:
"Unfortunately, Werner's field observations were limited to a small district, the Erz mountains and the neighboring parts of Saxony and Bohemia. And his chronological scheme of formations was founded upon the mode of occurrence of the rocks within these narrow confines." (p. 59.)
And yet, as we have seen, it is precisely such a charge as this that Spencer and Huxley bring against the modern phase of the doctrine of successive ages based on the succession of life idea. Werner, from observations "limited to a small district," constructed his scheme of exact chronological sequence, basing it entirely upon the mineral or mechanical character of his "suites." And hundreds of enthusiastic followers long declared that the rocks everywhere conformed to this classification, even so great an observer as von Humboldt thinking that the rocks which he examined in Central and South America fully confirmed Werner's chronological arrangement.
But such notions to-day only cause a smile of pity, for it is now well known that, take the world over, the rocks do not occur as Werner imagined, though, as Geikie says, he and his disciples were as certain of the matter "as if they had been present at the formation of the earth's crust." Besides, as already pointed out, we moderns ought now to have pretty well assimilated the idea that while one kind of mineral or rock was forming in one locality, a totally different kind of deposit may have been in process of formation in another spot some distance off at the very same time, and we cannot imagine a time in the past when this principle would not hold good. But in a precisely similar way the idea of a time value was, as we shall see, transferred from the mechanical and mineral character of the rocks to their fossil contents; and from observations again "limited to a small district," William Smith and Cuvier conceived the idea that the fossils occurred only in a certain order; that only certain fossils lived at a certain time; that, for example, while Trilobites were living and dying in one locality, Nummulites or Mammals positively were not living and dying in another locality, though in any system of clear thinking this latter notion is just as irrational as that of Werner. Hence Spencer is compelled to say, "though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its spirit is still traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the conclusions of its antagonists."
The two cases are exactly parallel; only it has taken us nearly a hundred years, it seems, to find out that the fossils do not follow the prearranged order of Smith and Cuvier any better than the rocks and minerals do the scheme of Werner. If hundreds of geologists still seem to think that the fossils in general agree with the standard order, we must remember how many sharp observers said the same thing for decades about Werner's scheme. The taint of heredity will always come out sooner or later; and both of these schemes exhibit very strongly the family history of the whole tribe of Cosmogonies, viz., the facts refuse to certify that they are of sound mind.
It was William Smith, an English land surveyor, who first conceived the idea of fixing the relative ages of strata by their fossils. Just how far he carried this idea it seems difficult to determine exactly. Lyell[8] says nothing along this line about him, save that he followed the leading divisions of the Secondary strata as outlined by Werner, though he claims "independently" of the latter. Whewell[9] remarks rather pityingly on his having had "no literary cultivation" in his youth, but has nothing about the degree in which he is responsible for the modern scheme of life succession of which many modern geologists have made him the "father". Geikie and Zittel are much more explicit. The former[10] says that "he had reached early in life the conclusions on which his fame rests, and he never advanced beyond them." "His plain, solid, matter-of-fact intellect never branched into theory or speculation, but occupied itself wholly in the observation of facts." Zittel[11] says pretty much the same thing, remarking that "Smith confined himself to the empirical investigation of his country, and was never tempted into general speculations about the history of the formation of the earth"—words which to my mind are the very highest praise, for they seem to indicate that he was only in a very limited way responsible for the unscientific and illogical scheme of a "phylogenic series" or complete "life-history of the earth," which now passes as the science of geology. Doubtless like his little bright-eyed German contemporary, A. G. Werner, he had not had his imagination sufficiently cultivated in his youth to be able to appreciate the beauty of first assuming your premises and then proving them by means of your conclusion, i.e., first assuming that there has been a gradual development on the earth from the lowest to the highest, and then arranging the fossils from scattered localities over the earth in such a way that they cannot fail to testify to the fact.
The following may be taken as a fair statement of what he actually accomplished and taught: