ABSTRACT
The recent progress of Geology has been a still further departure from primitive conceptions. Modern geology has established truths which are irreconcilable with the belief that the formation and destruction of strata began when the Cambrian rocks were formed; or at anything like so recent a time. The greater part of the evidence which might have served to settle the Development-controversy, is forever lost; and on neither side can the arguments derived from Geology be conclusive. Schouw marks out on the Earth more than twenty botanical regions, occupied by groups of forms so distinct, that, if fossilized, geologists would scarcely be disposed to refer them all to the same period. And finding that igneous action, to which sundry earlier geologists had ascribed basaltic rocks, was in countless places a cause of disturbance, he taught that from it resulted the periodic convulsions.
