This is the less remarkable when we reflect what a hard fight geology
has had. A generation after Newton's death fossils were referred
for their origin to a certain "plastic power" in Nature--mere idle
whittlings of bone that had never known an outfit of flesh and
blood. Then came a long and motley procession of cosmogonies, every
speculator, from John Wesley down to Pye Smith, insisting warmly
on what seemed good in his own eyes. The last stand was made on the
antiquity of man, and it is only a dozen years since the ablest of
British--perhaps since Cuvier of modern--geologists, Sir Charles
Lyell, yielded to the preponderance of evidence, and confessed that
the era of man's appearance on earth had been made too recent. A few
determined skirmishers still linger behind the line of retreat, like
Ney at the bridge of Kowno, and fire some fruitless shots at the
advancing enemy. This is well. Tribulation and opposition are good
for any creed, scientific or other. It weeds out the weak ones and
strengthens those that are to stand.

The mapping out of extinct faunas and floras and assigning pedigree
to existing species are by no means the whole province of geologists.
Productive industry owes to them a vast saving of time and cost in
searching for useful minerals. They distinguish the same strata in
widely separated districts by means of the characteristic fossils,
and are thus enabled to guide the miner. A geological survey of its
territory is one of the first cares of an enlightened government, and
a geologist is the one scientific official the leading States of the
Union agree in maintaining. The science has moved forward steadily
from its original office of studying buried deposits and classifying
extinct organisms, until the hard and fast line between fossil and
recent has disappeared, the continuous action of ordinary causes in