y, the brilliant Stenson, in
Italy, and Hooke, in England, had laid hold of some of the problems
presented by fossil remains, and Woodward, with others, had labored in the
same field. In the eighteenth century, especially in its latter half,
men's minds were busy about the physical agencies determining or modifying
the features of the earth's crust; water and fire, subsidence from a
primeval ocean and transformation by outbursts of the central heat,
Neptune and Pluto were being appealed to, by Werner on the one hand and by
Demarest on the other, in explanation of the earth's phenomena. The way
was being prepared, theories and views were abundant, and many sound
observations had been made; and yet the science of geology, properly so
called, the exact and proved knowledge of the successive phases of the
world's life, may be said to date from the closing years of the eighteenth
century.

In 1783 James Hutton put forward in a brief memoir his Theory of the
Earth, which, in 1795, two years before his death, he expanded into a
book; but his ideas failed to lay hold of men's minds until the century
had passed away, when, in 1802, they found an able expositor in John
Playfair. The very same year that Hutton published his book, Cuvier came
to Paris and almost forthwith began, with Brongniart, his immortal
researches into the fossils of Paris and its neighborhood. And four years
later, in the year 1799 itself, William Smith's tabular list of strata and
fossils saw the light. It is, I believe, not too much to say that out of
these, geology, as we now know it, sprang.

It was thus in the closing years of the eighteenth century that was begun
the work which the nineteenth century has carried forward to such great
results; but at this time only the select few had grasped the truth, and
even they only the beginning of it. Outside a narrow circle the thoughts
even of the educated about the history of the globe were bounded by the
story of the Deluge,--though the story was often told in a strange
fashion,--or were guided by fantastic views of the plastic forces of a
sportive nature.

In another branch of science, in that which deals with the problems
presented by living beings, the thoughts of men in 1799 were also very
different from the thoughts of men to-day. It is a very old quest, the
quest after the knowledge of the nature of living beings, one of the
earliest on which man set out; for it promised to lead him to a knowledge
of