Plato and Thales of Miletus. Indeed the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia seem to indicate that a tribe with very similar characteristics existed several millenniums before the Christian era. But discarding all these, the first men that we need to mention are perhaps Burnet and Whiston, who knew no other way of arriving at geological truth than to spin a yarn about how the world was made. Woodward seems to have had a little better sense, and is named along with Hooke and John Ray as one of the real founders of the science.

Unfortunately the brood of Cosmogonists was not dead, for Moro and De Maillet were at this same period spinning their fantastic theories about the origin of things; or as Zittel puts it, "accepted the risks of error, and set about explaining the past and present from the subjective standpoint."[5] This tendency we will find to be a birthmark in the family, and will serve to invariably identify any of them wherever found. We must remember this, and apply the test to the modern survivors.

Buffon seems to have been really the founder of the family in the modern form. He is credited with the sarcastic remark that "geologists must feel like the ancient Roman augurs who could not meet each other without laughing;" though in view of his fantastic scheme of seven "epochs," in which he endeavors to portray "the beginning, the past, and the future (sic) of our planet,"[6] one is reminded of the common symptom which manifests itself in thinking all the rest of the world crazy.

The "Heroic Age of Geology" succeeded this period, and was characterized largely by a determination to discard speculation, and to seek to build up a true science of actual fact and truth.

We have already seen from Spencer's remarks that A. G. Werner, who was, however, one of the leaders in Germany at this time, was very far from following true inductive methods. And the following language of Sir Arch. Geikie shows that in him the family characteristics were decidedly prominent:

"But never in the history of science did a stranger hallucination arise than that of Werner and his school, when they supposed themselves to discard theory and build on a foundation of accurately-ascertained fact. Never was a system devised in which theory was more rampant; theory, too, unsupported by observation, and, as we now know, utterly erroneous. From beginning to end of Werner's method and its applications, assumptions were made for which there was no ground, and these assumptions were treated as demonstrable facts. The very point to be proved was taken for granted, and the geognosts, who boasted of their avoidance of speculation, were in reality among the most hopelessly speculative of all the generations that had tried to solve the problem of the theory of the earth."[7]

In fact this author says that:

"The Wernerians were as certain of the origin and sequence of the rocks as if they had been present at the formation of the earth's crust." (pp. 288-9.)

Here we see the family characteristics very strongly developed.

In speaking of Werner's five successive "suites" or onion-coats in which he wrapped his embryo world, Zittel complains:

"Unfortunately, Werner's field observations were limited to a small district, the Erz mountains and the neighboring parts of Saxony and Bohemia. And his chronological scheme of formations was founded upon the mode of occurrence of the rocks within these narrow confines." (p. 59.)

And yet, as we have seen, it is precisely such a charge as this that Spencer and Huxley bring against the modern phase of the doctrine of successive ages based on the succession of life idea. Werner, from observations "limited to a small district," constructed his scheme of exact chronological sequence, basing it entirely upon the mineral or mechanical character of his "suites." And hundreds of enthusiastic followers long declared that the rocks everywhere conformed to this classification, even so great an observer as von Humboldt thinking that the rocks which he examined in Central and South America fully confirmed Werner's chronological arrangement.

But such notions to-day only cause a smile of pity, for it is now well known that, take the world over, the rocks do not occur as Werner imagined, though, as Geikie says, he and his disciples were as certain of the matter "as if they had been present at the formation of the earth's crust." Besides, as already pointed out, we moderns ought now to have pretty well assimilated the idea that while one kind of mineral or rock was forming in one locality, a totally different kind of deposit may have been in process of formation in another spot some distance off at the very same time, and we cannot imagine a time in the past when this principle would not hold good. But in a precisely similar way the idea of a time value was, as we shall see, transferred from the mechanical and mineral character of the rocks to their fossil contents; and from observations again "limited to a small district," William Smith and Cuvier conceived the idea that the fossils occurred only in a certain order; that only certain fossils lived at a certain time; that, for example, while Trilobites were living and dying in one locality, Nummulites or Mammals positively were not living and dying in another locality, though in any system of clear thinking this latter notion is just as irrational as that of Werner. Hence Spencer is compelled to say, "though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its spirit is still traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the conclusions of its antagonists."

The two cases are exactly parallel; only it has taken us nearly a hundred years, it seems, to find out that the fossils do not follow the prearranged order of Smith and Cuvier any better than the rocks and minerals do the scheme of Werner. If hundreds of geologists still seem to think that the fossils in general agree with the standard order, we must remember how many sharp observers said the same thing for decades about Werner's scheme. The taint of heredity will always come out sooner or later; and both of these schemes exhibit very strongly the family history of the whole tribe of Cosmogonies, viz., the facts refuse to certify that they are of sound mind.

It was William Smith, an English land surveyor, who first conceived the idea of fixing the relative ages of strata by their fossils. Just how far he carried this idea it seems difficult to determine exactly. Lyell[8] says nothing along this line about him, save that he followed the leading divisions of the Secondary strata as outlined by Werner, though he claims "independently" of the latter. Whewell[9] remarks rather pityingly on his having had "no literary cultivation" in his youth, but has nothing about the degree in which he is responsible for the modern scheme of life succession of