Of all the various branches of science, none perhaps is to-day, none for these many years past has been, so well known to, even if not understood by, most people as that of geology. Its practical lessons have brought wealth to many; its fairy tales have brought delight to more; and round it hovers the charm of danger, for the conclusions to which it leads touch on the nature of man's beginning.
In 1799 the science of geology, as we now know it, was struggling into birth. There had been from of old cosmogonies, theories as to how the world had taken shape out of primeval chaos. In that fresh spirit which marked the zealous search after natural knowledge pursued in the middle and latter part of the seventeenth century, 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.