[44] The first edition appeared in 1812, consisting principally of the Memoirs to which reference has already been made.
[2nd Ed.] [Among the many valuable contributions to Palæontology in more recent times, I may especially mention Mr. Owen’s Reports on British Fossil Reptiles, on British Fossil Mammalia, and on the Extinct Animals of Australia, with descriptions of certain Fossils indicative of large Marsupial Pachydermata: and M. Agassiz’s Report on the Fossil Fishes of the Devonian System, his Synoptical Table of British Fossil Fishes, and his Report on the Fishes of the London Clay. All these are contained in the volumes produced by the British Association from 1839 to 1845. [520]
A new and most important instrument of palæontological investigation has been put in the geologist’s hand by Prof. Owen’s discovery, that the internal structure of teeth, as disclosed by the microscope, is a means of determining the kind of the animal. He has carried into every part of the animal kingdom an examination founded upon this discovery, and has published the results of this in his Odontography. As an example of the application of this character of animals, I may mention that a tooth brought from Riga by Sir R. Murchison was in this way ascertained by Mr. Owen to belong to a fish of the genus Dendrodus. (Geology of Russia, i. 67.)]
When it had thus been established, that the strata of the earth are characterized by innumerable remains of the organized beings which formerly inhabited it, and that anatomical and physiological considerations must be carefully and skilfully applied in order rightly to interpret these characters, the geologist and the palæontologist obviously had, brought before them, many very wide and striking questions. Of these we may give some instances; but, in the first place, we may add a few words concerning those eminent philosophers to whom the science owed the basis on which succeeding speculations were to be built.
Sect. 5.—Intellectual Characters of the Founders of Systematic Descriptive Geology.
It would be in accordance with the course we have pursued in treating of other subjects, that we should attempt to point out in the founders of the science now under consideration, those intellectual qualities and habits to which we ascribe their success. The very recent date of the generalizations of geology, which has hardly allowed us time to distinguish the calm expression of the opinion of the wisest judges, might, in this instance, relieve us from such a duty; but since our plan appears to suggest it, we will, at least, endeavor to mark the characters of the founders of geology, by a few of their prominent lines.
The three persons who must be looked upon as the main authors of geological classification are, Werner, Smith, and Cuvier. These three men were of very different mental constitution; and it will, perhaps, not be difficult to compare them, in reference to those qualities which we have all along represented as the main features of the discoverer’s genius, clearness of ideas, the possession of numerous facts, and the power of bringing these two elements into contact. [521]
In the German, considering him as a geologist, the ideal element predominated. That Werner’s powers of external discrimination were extremely acute, we have seen in speaking of him as a mineralogist; and his talent and tendency for classifying were, in his mineralogical studies, fully fed by an abundant store of observation; but when he came to apply this methodizing power to geology, the love of system, so fostered, appears to have been too strong for the collection of facts he had to deal with. As we have already said, he promulgated, as representing the world, a scheme collected from a province, and even too hastily gathered from that narrow field. Yet his intense spirit of method in some measure compensated for other deficiencies, and enabled him to give the character of a science to what had been before a collection of miscellaneous phenomena. The ardor of system-making produced a sort of fusion, which, however superficial, served to bind together the mass of incoherent and mixed materials, and thus to form, though by strange and anomalous means, a structure of no small strength and durability, like the ancient vitrified structures which we find in some of our mountain regions.
Of a very different temper and character was William Smith. No literary cultivation of his youth awoke in him the speculative love of symmetry and system; but a singular clearness and precision of the classifying power, which he possessed as a native talent, was exercised and developed by exactly those geological facts among which his philosophical task lay. Some of the advances which he made, had, as we have seen, been at least entered upon by others who preceded him: but of all this he was ignorant; and, perhaps, went on more steadily and eagerly to work out his own ideas, from the persuasion that they were entirely his own. At a later period of his life, he himself published an account of the views which had animated him in his earlier progress. In this account[45] he dates his attempts to discriminate and connect strata from the year 1790, at which time he was twenty years old. In 1792, he “had considered how he could best represent the order of superposition—continuity of course—and general eastern declination of the strata.” Soon after, doubts which had arisen were removed by the “discovery of a mode of identifying the strata by the organized fossils respectively imbedded therein.” And “thus stored with ideas,” as he expresses himself, he began to communicate them to his friends. In all this, we see great vividness [522] of thought and activity of mind, unfolding itself exactly in proportion to the facts with which it had to deal. We are reminded of that cyclopean architecture in which each stone, as it occurs, is, with wonderful ingenuity, and with the least possible alteration of its form, shaped so as to fit its place in a solid and lasting edifice.
[45] Phil. Mag. 1833, vol. i. p. 38.