it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and
Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a
severe induction, which had been never before applied to them; and
thus gradually, in the last half-century, the whole choir of
cosmical sciences have acquired a soundness, severity, and fulness,
which render them, as mere intellectual exercises, as valuable to a
manly mind as Mathematics and Metaphysics.

But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable
standing ground! It is a question whether, even twenty years ago,
Geology, as it then stood, was worth troubling one's head about, so
little had been really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work,
even within the last fifteen years, of those who stedfastly set
themselves to the task of proving and of asserting at all risks,
that the Maker of the coal seam and the diluvial cave could not be
a "Deus quidam deceptor," and that the facts which the rock and the
silt revealed were sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the
sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they contradicted His
other messages. When a few more years are past, Buckland and
Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell, Delabˆche and Phillips, Forbes and
Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accompanied and followed
them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race;
and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much
misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they had to endure
from well-meaning fanatics like Fairholme or Granville Penn, and
the respectable mob at their heels who tried (as is the fashion in
such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible,
by twisting facts just enough to make them fit the fancied meaning
of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied
meaning of the facts. But there were a few who would have no