o be exclusively engaged in furnishing materials for
future generalizations. By acting up to these principles with
consistency, they in a few years disarmed all prejudice, and rescued the
science from the imputation of being a dangerous, or at best but a
visionary pursuit.

A distinguished modern writer has with truth remarked, that the
advancement of three of the main divisions of geological inquiry have
during the last half century been promoted successively by three
different nations of Europe,--the Germans, the English, and the
French.[120] We have seen that the systematic study of what may be
called mineralogical geology had its origin and chief point of activity
in Germany, where Werner first described with precision the mineral
characters of rocks. The classification of the secondary formations,
each marked by their peculiar fossils, belongs, in a great measure, to
England, where the labors before alluded to of Smith, and those of the
most active members of the Geological Society of London, were steadily
directed to these objects. The foundation of the third branch, that
relating to the tertiary formations, was laid in France by the splendid
work of Cuvier and Brongniart, published in 1808, "On the Mineral
Geography and Organic Remains of the Neighborhood of Paris."

We may still trace, in the language of the science and our present
methods of arrangement, the various countries where the growth of these
several departments of geology was at different times promoted. Many
names of simple minerals and rocks remain to this day German; while the
European divisions of the secondary strata are in great part English,
and are, indeed, often founded too exclusively on English types. Lastly,
the subdivisions first established of the succession of strata in the
Paris basin have served as normal groups to which other tertiary
deposits throughout Europe have been compared, even in cases where this
standard was wholly inapplicable.

No period could have been more fortunate for the discovery, in the
immediate neighborhood of Paris, of a rich store of well-preserved
fossils, than the commencement of the present century; for at no former
era had Natural history been cultivated with such enthusiasm in the
French metropolis. The labors of Cuvier in comparative osteology, and of
Lamarck in recent and fossil shells, had raised these departments of
study to a rank of which they had never previously been deemed
susceptible. Their in