aily by the earth--The fixed stars--John Herschel's studies
of double stars--Fraunhofer's perfection of the refracting
telescope--Bessel's measurement of the parallax of a star,--Henderson's
measurements--Kirchhoff and Bunsen's perfection of the
spectroscope--Wonderful revelations of the spectroscope--Lord Kelvin's
estimate of the time that will be required for the earth to become
completely cooled--Alvan Clark's discovery of the companion star of
Sirius--The advent of the photographic film in astronomy--Dr. Huggins's
studies of nebulae--Sir Norman Lockyer's "cosmogonic guess,"--Croll's
pre-nebular theory.

CHAPTER III. THE NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY

William Smith and fossil shells--His discovery that fossil rocks are
arranged in regular systems--Smith's inquiries taken up by Cuvier--His
Ossements Fossiles containing the first description of hairy
elephant--His contention that fossils represent extinct species
only--Dr. Buckland's studies of English fossil-beds--Charles Lyell
combats catastrophism,--Elaboration of his ideas with reference to
the rotation of species--The establishment of the doctrine of
uniformitarianism,--Darwin's Origin of Species--Fossil man--Dr.
Falconer's visit to the fossil-beds in the valley of the
Somme--Investigations of Prestwich and Sir John Evans--Discovery of the
Neanderthal skull,--Cuvier's rejection of human fossils--The finding
of prehistoric carving on ivory--The fossil-beds of America--Professor
Marsh's paper on the fossil horses in America--The Warren mastodon,--The
Java fossil, Pithecanthropus Erectus.

CHAPTER IV. THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN GEOLOGY

James Hutton and the study of the rocks--His theory of the earth--His
belief in volcanic cataclysms in raising and forming the continents--His
famous paper before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1781---His
conclusions that all strata of the earth have their origin at the bottom
of the sea---His deduction that heated and expanded matter caused the
elevation of land above the sea-level--Indifference at first shown this
remarkable paper--Neptunists versus Plutonists--Scrope's classical work
on volcanoes--Final acceptance of Hutton's explanation of the origin
of granites--Lyell and uniformitarianism--Observations on the gradual
elevation of the coast-lines of Sweden and Patagonia--Observations on
the enormous amount of land erosion constantly taking place,-