fell from the clouds? That it was swept away hither, all the way from South America, by some southwesterly storm, and, wearied out at last, dropped here to find rest, as in a sacred place?" what would you answer? "My friend, that is a beautiful imagination: but I must treat it only as such, as long as I can explain the mystery more simply by facts which I do know. I do not know that humming-birds can be blown across the Atlantic alive. I do know that they are actually brought across the Atlantic dead; are stuck in ladies' hats. I know that ladies visit the cathedral: and, odd as the accident is, I prefer to believe, till I get a better explanation, that the humming-bird has simply dropped out of a lady's hat." There, again, you would be speaking common-sense; and using, too, sound inductive method; trying to explain what you do not know from what you do know already.
Now, I ask of you to employ the same common-sense when you read and think of geology.
It is very necessary to do so. For in past times men have tried to explain the making of the world around them, its oceans, rivers, mountains, and continents, by I know not what of fancied cataclysms and convulsions of Nature; explaining the unknown by the still more unknown, till some of their geological theories were no more rational, because no more founded on known facts, than that of the New Zealand Maories, who hold that some god, when fishing, fished up their islands out of the bottom of the ocean. But a sounder and wiser school of geologists now reigns; the father of whom, in England at least, is the venerable Sir Charles Lyell. He was almost the first of Englishmen who taught lis to see—what common-sense tells us—that the laws which we see at work around us now have been most probably at work since the creation of the world; and that whatever changes may seem to have taken place in past ages, and in ancient rocks, should be explained, if possible, by the changes which are taking place now in the most recent deposits—in the soil of the field.
And in the last 40 years—since that great and sound idea has become rooted in the minds of students, and specially of English students—geology has thriven and developed, perhaps more than any other science; and has led men on to discoveries far more really astonishing and awful than all fancied convulsions and cataclysms.
I have planned this series of papers, therefore, on Sir Charles Lyell's method. I have begun by trying to teach a little about the part of the earth's crust which lies nearest us, which we see most often—namely, the soil; intending, if my readers do me the honor to read the papers which follow, to lead them downward, as it were, into the earth; deeper and deeper in each paper, to rocks and minerals which are probably less known to them than the soil in the fields. Thus you will find I shall lead you, or try to lead you on, throughout the series, from the known to the unknown, and show you how to explain the latter by the former. Sir Charles Lyell has, I see, in the new edition of
