John Phillips

“ Nature, as we see it, exists under the influence of particular forces and conditions, vital, chemical, and mechanical; and the sum of the phenomena that now occur in a given time is the measure of those forces and conditions. The exterior influence of the sun, and the ethereal spaces; the mass and quality of the atmosphere; the size, figure, density, and motions of the earth; the distribution of land and sea, —are all circumstances of great importance, to which the vegetable and animal productions of the globe, as well as the chemical and mechanical operations upon it, are adjusted. ”

“ The body of mere travellers who now hurry over the globe on the wings of steam, would be converted into valuable pioneers for the yet unexplored wastes of geology, could they be made to see and feel the power which is possessed by every voyager to contribute, though not so abundantly as the prince of travellers, Humboldt, to the stores of natural science. ”

“ Lest, however, we should fall into as great absurdities of another kind as these we have mentioned, it will be prudent to determine, if possible, the true character of a general theory of the earth; for in this there is a great liability to error. Geology, regarded as a body of facts, comprises not exclusively, nor specially, the phenomena which are now, or have been at any one former time, in progress on and within the earth, but embraces the whole succession of these occurrences, from the earliest operation of natural laws on the globe to the present hour. ”

“ In planning and executing public works, such as canals, railroads, and common roads, a knowledge of the rocky structure of a country ought to be considered indispensable, and the boring rod is in continual requisition. But the engineer, who is also a geologist, will find it a surer method of research, to trace the systems of strata across miles of country, than to merely feel by the chisel at so many points of a line. ”

“ To see these rivers of hot water pouring forth for a thousand years undiminished in heat or abundance, is one of the most remarkable and even (as professor Forbes truly says) romantic circumstances which fall under the notice of geology. The conclusion to which they obviously point of the existence of a general heat below the surface of the earth, is indisputable, whether, with Dr. Daubeny, we view that heat as the result of chemical action, and call it volcanic, or, with Humboldt and Arago, regard it as the residue of the original ignition (chaleur d'origine) of our planet. ”

“ The solution of an old geological problem requires far more caution than the explanation of a modern geographical phenomenon. For in regard to the older events we are seldom aware of all the essential facts, from which not only the nature of the physical agency is to be ascertained, but the measure of its force, the local centre of its effect, and the sudden or gradual, the continuous or interrupted mode of its application. The geographical relations of tertiary strata must be understood before venturing to adopt or to reject the hypothesis of partial elevation and subsidence. ”

“ It is not prettiness nor gentle beauty, nor antithetic effect of colour or outline, which reward the wanderer among the Grampian Hills; but a deep feeling of the grand and awful harmonies of nature is sure to steal into his mind, and linger there even after he has climbed the snowy Alps or sunny Pyrenees. ”

“ At the same time the youth of Oxford and Cambridge receive accurate and admirable instructions from the lips of gifted men; lectures are given in every philosophical institution; geological maps and books are offered in every window; and all these various modes of scientific caution are urged in vain: the pit is sunk, and the landowner is ruined, merely by the honest error of a workman set to a task beyond his experience. ”

“ Those persons who, confiding in what are somewhat hastily called general views, believe too strictly in the gradual change and sequence of organic life on the globe, and have pictured to themselves the early land and sea as tenanted only by the simpler (and, as they are erroneously termed, inferior or imperfect) forms of life, while in each succeeding period new, more complicated, and more exalted plants and animals were called into being, till man was at last awakened to the supremacy of creation, will find the fossil quadrupeds of Stonesfield a very puzzling anomaly. ”

“ On this point, if we turn our eyes on existing nature, nothing appears so likely to aid our conception as the damp forests on the Oronoko, Maranon, or Mississippi, from whose mere waste the mighty rivers roll every year to the Atlantic an immeasurable mass of trees and herbs, with soil, sand, and clay, which are in process of time arranged on the bed of the ocean, as we find the coal and its accompanying sands and clays to be. ”

“ Now, as all historic records end, for each country, with the surface,—terminate at some point of man's history posterior to the preparation of that tract for his residence, we see how far more ancient than the historic date of the human race is the series of productions which lie below the surface. The limit of least antiquity of the scale of geological time is in every country beyond the date of the present surface. The series of strata is so ancient, that even its uppermost and newest term in every country is older than the race of man now existing there ”

“ Very great fissures appear indeed in all parts of the glacier, but the displacements which these occasion as the masses move onward grow more and more remarkable, because of the additional effect of waste on the surface, in the fissures, and below the glacier.
The glacier thus slowly gliding or flowing down its channel is like a huge grinding and polishing mass. Not that the ice of which it consists can wear much even of the limestone and still less of the gneissic bed of an Alpine or Scandinavian valley, any more than pitch can wear hard speculum metal ”

“ The displacement of the earth's axis cannot be assumed, on satisfactory grounds, as a thing within the range of probability; for the earth is a figure of equilibrium, and therefore its axis is fixed, as far as any ordinary tendencies in the mass itself are concerned; and neither comets nor planetary attractions are thought to be influential for such an object. We are, therefore, reduced to the supposition of violent disruption of the crust of the earth, if we wish to explain diluvial phenomena by one or many transient overflows of the sea. ”

“ Amorphous Masses under all the Strata.—If granitic veins surprise us by their smallness and the perfection with which they have been injected into all the ramifications of a stratified rock, the vastness of the masses from which they arise is even more remarkable. For it is certainly true, that in every place, yet completely explored, the veins end downwards in granite formations, so extensive and unbounded, and appearing at so many points beneath the lowest strata, as to deserve, more than any other assemblages of mineral masses yet made known, the title of an universal formation. ”

“ To describe what is known of the structure of the earth in the order of the occurrence of the phenomena—to present a series of pictures of its successive conditions—to exhibit these conditions as influencing others which succeeded them, till the present aspect of nature appears as a consequence of all the previous changes, is in fact to write the physical history of our planet upon the same plan as that universally adopted for histories of its human inhabitants. ”

“ Geology thus presents itself in an aspect which may surprise those who have not studied the philosophy of the subject. Though it gathers the most striking and beautiful facts, it depends for their interpretation entirely upon the progress of collateral science, and puts forth no speculation or hypothesis, except in conformity with the known laws of nature, and as a means of exciting and directing inquiry. In proportion as the philosophy of chemical, mechanical, and vital phenomena advances, so the interpretation of geological phenomena expands ”

“ There may not always be found a geologist, willing to turn away from his delightful studies, to avert the ruin which can only fall on those who disregard the plainest truths of geology.
In countries where coal has long been worked, almost every district is explored at least nearly to its boundaries. This is at present the case in England—indeed, generally in Europe; and, consequently, it may be thought that the time has gone by for the geologist to be of service, and the future is to be in trusted to coal viewers and workmen. ”

“ To fix the line of a road is the problem, and a knowledge of the geological structure of the country on a large scale is one of the grand data for a true solution of it. When the line is fixed, the practical man will need minuter information than geology can give, but there will be many occasions for the exercise of this science where tunnels, and deep cuttings often show loose sands and other formidable things unexplored by the boring-rod, though not beyond the expectation of a geologist. ”

“ On the contrary, the geologist who, in the full spirit of Cuvier, regards the systems of life as definitely related now, and at all past periods, to the contemporaneous physical conditions of the globe, and uses the remains of plants and animals as monuments and guides to a right knowledge of these conditions, draws from this singular and extraordinary discovery the confirmation of a hope, that the state of the ancient land may not for ever be wholly concealed from patient inquiry. ”

“ Thus the study of the ancient natural history of the earth draws help from every kind of inquiry which man can make into the actual constitution of nature, but robs none of its interest or glory; on the contrary, by the novelty of its discovered facts, fresh problems are presented to the cultivators of natural science, and a perpetual excitement is kept up, which has proved of infinite service to them all. ”

“ Science is perfect only when it is in the form of a truly general theory; and perhaps it is not too much to believe that the utmost efforts of the human mind may fail in the attempt to comprehend all natural phenomena perceptible by our organisation in one such theory.
Even if, hereafter, it should be found possible to include the most comprehensive theory of ponder able matter, gravitation, and the undulatory theory of light and heat, into one wider generalisation for all inorganic matter, there would still remain the mysterious phenomena of life ”

“ One of the early attempts to conquer this difficulty is that of Lehman, who deserved more attention than Werner's somewhat contemptuous notice.
"What is called a rent, is an open fissure in a mountain, which has been produced by a division of the rocks; and veins are, in my opinion, nothing but fissures which have been filled by nature with stones, minerals, metals, and clay—in short, which are of a very different nature from the rock itself." ”

“ Organic Remains.—By whatever name these ancient strata shall in future be called, they must always bear to the philosophic student of geology a peculiar and paramount interest, as the oldest rocks in which organic remains are certainly known to occur. It may surprise the speculators in Cosmogony to hear that these, the most ancient forms of life known to us, are not plants, but animals: not even the lowest grades of their respective classes, but perfectly developed zoophyta, echinodermata, brachiopoda, and trilobites. ”

“ Now, as an examination of the smaller and larger faults, when their planes can be clearly seen, appears to show that only one kind of action has been impressed upon the masses, as they appear to have slided in one direction, have been rubbed on their faces in one direction, and exhibit almost never any signs of repeated action along the same or neighbouring planes, we are forced to adopt, as a highly probable view of their origin, one continuous effort of a great force tending to extend, and, consequently inducing tension in, and fracture of, the crust of the globe. ”

“ All variations in the proportions of land and water; all variations of level; all changes in the combination and distribution of masses or molecules of matter, whether above, upon, or below the surface; all changes in the number, structure, forms, and relations of plants and animals, are to be ascertained as facts, and employed in reasoning, for tracing a general and continuous history of the physical revolutions which the earth has experienced since it became a planet. ”

“ It is sometimes, not very fairly, objected to modern geology, that the superior accuracy and power of research which it has turned on the ancient mysteries of nature, has been purchased at the cost of the plainness and accessibility which it is imagined should attend the interpretation of phenomena so obvious as those in the crust of the earth: but in reality no branch of the study of external nature is less loaded with technical impediments. ”

“ If we admit what is perhaps impossible to be denied that the production of each sort of rock spread from some centre, and that these centres were not coincident for different rocks, it becomes a very curious problem to determine what are the lines of contemporaneity in the oolitic system.
For let A be a point from whence a deposition of carbonate of lime spreads slowly through the ocean, but not reaching to B, a point from which depositions of sand happen, not reaching to A—the general basis r, r, r, being red marl and sandstone. ”

“ But geology is really distinct from cosmogony. Inquiries into the origin of the planetary bodies belong to one of the highest of human sciences,—astronomy. Geology, far from intruding within its precincts, supposes the globe to be constituted as a planet moving round the sun; takes for granted all the laws which this relation implies, and limits itself to the discovery of the strictly terrestrial phenomena which have happened upon this globe under these conditions. ”

“ Why, for example, should it almost never occur that the substance of porphyritic and basaltic dykes, whether they pass through slate, coal, sandstone, or limestone, is extended from the main body into the numerous small cracks and fissures which margin the dyke; while, on the other hand, there are few situations where granite comes in contact with gneiss, clay slate, limestone, mica slate, or hornblende slate, without throwing off many branches into those rocks? ”

“ The greater part of these grand events belong to that part of subterranean natural history, which can only be elucidated by a consideration of the facts which the earth presents to our view; for all these great revolutions took place at a period long before the globe became habitable to the human species. But whether fissures and veins were actually formed in the manner we have described, or not, it is no less true that this manner of representing their mode of formation, and the relative situation which they bear to one another in the mountain, is the most simple way of accounting for them. ”

“ To understand rightly the daily accumulating stores of organic reliquiæ, requires more than a slight knowledge of existing nature,—more even than an acquaintance with animal and vegetable forms. The philosophy of their existence must be considered—the variations of their structure, with respiration in air or in water—life in fresh or salt water—in trees or on the ground—carnivorous or herbivorous food—their geographical distribution dependence—on climate and atmospheric conditions. ”

“ Ignorant as we are of the extent and character of diluvial phenomena in all the southern zones of the world, it is desirable to avoid a decision on the much controverted origin of the erratic blocks, especially as some of the proposed solutions are mechanically absurd. One of the most ingenious, and perhaps least hypothetical, of the modern notions on the subject, is, that the great blocks of the Alps and Scandinavia were floated away on icebergs, and so dropped on the sea bed or on the temporarily submerged land. ”

“ But there is one remarkable exception to this analogy of the tertiary and diluvial fauna, with our present races of mammalia; no remains of Man have yet been found in any of these deposits—no trace of his works; and it is yet entirely doubtful whether the race of man existed at all during what are called the diluvial periods. The same exception almost extends to the order of quadrumana, which, in their animal nature and organisation, most nearly resemble ourselves; for these have rarely been recognised in a fossil state. ”

“ Thus viewed, the present system of nature appears, when compared with the older periods, one in which local diversities of condition have gone to extreme—where all the peculiarities of climate and surface have given the fullest effect to the variety of nature, and yielded that astonishing complexity of dependent phenomena which incessantly engages the mind of reasoning man in an endless train of inquiry. ”

“ On mountain sides, in ravines, and sea cliffs, the rocky masses of the earth are exhibited free from the obscurity of superficial accumulations: the industry of man, in mines, wells, roads, canals, has added to the facilities granted by nature, and from these opportunities the structure of the crust of the earth, the arrangement and relative position of the rocks, are known in the most essential points. ”