[98] V. 309, &c.
We must estimate in the same manner, the very remarkable passage brought to light by M. Elie de Beaumont,[99] from the Arabian writer, Kazwiri; in which we have a representation of the same spot of ground, as being, at successive intervals of five hundred years, a city, a sea, a desert, and again a city. This invention is adduced, I conceive, rather to feed the appetite of wonder, than to fix it upon any reality: as the title of his book, The Marvels of Nature obviously intimates.
[99] Ann. des Sc. Nat. xxv. 380.
The speculations of Aristotle, concerning the exchanges of land and sea which take place in long periods, are not formed in exactly the same spirit, but they are hardly more substantial; and seem to be quite as arbitrary, since they are not confirmed by any examples and proofs. After stating,[100] that the same spots of the earth are not always land and always water, he gives the reason. “The principle and cause of this is,” he says, “that the inner parts of the earth, like the bodies of plants and animals, have their ages of vigor and of decline; but in plants and animals all the parts are in vigor, and all grow old, at once: in the earth different parts arrive at maturity at different times by the operation of cold and heat: they grow and decay on account of the sun and the revolution of the stars, and thus the parts of the earth acquire different power, so that for a certain time they remain moist, and then become dry and old: and then other places are revivified, and become partially watery.” We are, I conceive, doing no injustice to such speculations by classing them among fanciful geological opinions.
[100] Meteorol. i. 14.
We must also, I conceive, range in the same division another class of writers of much more modern times;—I mean those who have trained their geology by interpretations of Scripture. I have already endeavored to show that such an attempt is a perversion of the purpose of a divine communication, and cannot lead to any physical truth. I do not here speak of geological speculations in which the Mosaic account of the deluge has been referred to; for whatever errors may have been committed on that subject, it would be as absurd to disregard the most ancient historical record, in attempting to trace back the history of the earth, as it would be, gratuitously to reject any other [584] source of information. But the interpretations of the account of the creation have gone further beyond the limits of sound philosophy: and when we look at the arbitrary and fantastical inventions by which a few phrases of the writings of Moses have been moulded into complete systems, we cannot doubt that these interpretations belong to the present Section.
I shall not attempt to criticize, nor even to enumerate, these Scriptural Geologies,—Sacred Theories of the Earth, as Burnet termed his. Ray, Woodward, Whiston, and many other persons to whom science has considerable obligations, were involved, by the speculative habits of their times, in these essays; and they have been resumed by persons of considerable talent and some knowledge, on various occasions up to the present day; but the more geology has been studied on its own proper evidence, the more have geologists seen the unprofitable character of such labors.
I proceed now to the next step in the progress of Theoretical Geology.
Sect. 3.—Of Premature Geological Theories.
While we were giving our account of Descriptive Geology, the attentive reader would perceive that we did, in fact, state several steps in the advance towards general knowledge; but when, in those cases, the theoretical aspect of such discoveries softened into an appearance of mere classification, the occurrence was assigned to the history of Descriptive rather than of Theoretical Geology. Of such a kind was the establishment, by a long and vehement controversy, of the fact, that the impressions in rocks are really the traces of ancient living things; such, again, were the division of rocks into Primitive, Secondary, Tertiary; the ascertainment of the orderly succession of organic remains: the consequent fixation of a standard series of formations and strata; the establishment of the igneous nature of trap rocks; and the like. These are geological truths which are assumed and implied in the very language which geology uses; thus showing how in this, as in all other sciences, the succeeding steps involve the preceding. But in the history of geological theory, we have to consider the wider attempts to combine the facts, and to assign them to their causes.