answer? "My friend, that is a beautiful imagination; but I must
treat it only as such, as long as I can explain the mystery more
simply by facts which I do know. I do not know that humming-birds
can be blown across the Atlantic alive. I do know they are actually
brought across the Atlantic dead; are stuck in ladies' hats. I know
that ladies visit the cathedral; and odd as the accident is, I prefer
to believe, till I get a better explanation, that the humming-bird
has simply dropped out of a lady's hat." There, again, you would be
speaking common sense; and using, too, sound inductive method; trying
to explain what you do not know from what you do know already.

Now, I ask of you to employ the same common sense when you read and
think of Geology.

It is very necessary to do so. For in past times men have tried to
explain the making of the world around them, its oceans, rivers,
mountains, and continents, by I know not what of fancied cataclysms
and convulsions of nature; explaining the unknown by the still more
unknown, till some of their geological theories were no more
rational, because no more founded on known facts, than that of the
New Zealand Maories, who hold that some god, when fishing, fished up
their islands out of the bottom of the ocean. But a sounder and
wiser school of geologists now reigns; the father of whom, in England
at least, is the venerable Sir Charles Lyell. He was almost the
first of Englishmen who taught us to see--what common sense tells us-
-that the laws which we see at work around us now have been most
probably at work since the creation of the world; and that whatever
changes may seem to have taken place in past ages, and in ancient
rocks, should be explained, if possible, by the changes which are
taking place now in the most recent deposits--in the soil of the