Charles Lyell

His clear exposition of the evidence would have terminated the discussion for ever, if the passions of mankind had not been enlisted in the dispute

The excavations made in 1517, for repairing the city of Verona, brought to light a multitude of curious petrifactions, and furnished matter for speculation to different authors, and among the rest to Fracastoro, who declared his opinion, …

It was not till the earlier part of the sixteenth century that geological phenomena began to attract the attention of the Christian nations. At that period a very animated controversy sprung up in Italy, concerning the true nature and …

his system was declared contradictory to certain passages in the Koran, and he was called upon publicly to recant

led Omar to his theory of a general subsidence. But

Von Hoff has suggested, with great probability, that the changes in the level of the Caspian

Pallas, in more recent times, has drawn the same inference.

the extension of the sea had been greater at some former periods

in the form of the coasts of Asia, and

important changes had taken place

of the tenth century, of which fragments are now extant, is a system of mineralogy by Avicenna, a physician in whose arrangement there is considerable merit. In the same century also, Omar, surnamed 'El Aalem,' or 'the Learned,' wrote a …

We shall now conclude our remarks on the opinions entertained before the Christian era... the observation of the present course of nature presented too many proofs of alterations continually in progress on the earth to allow philosophers …

Pliny had no theoretical opinions of his own concerning changes of the earth's surface... But his enumeration of the new islands which had been formed in the Mediterranean, and of other convulsions, shows that the ancients had not been …

We learn from a passage in Strabo, that it was a dogma of the Gaulish Druids that the universe was immortal, but destined to survive catastrophes both of fire and water. That this doctrine was communicated to them from the East, with much …

that volcanoes are safety valves, and that the subterranean convulsions are probably most violent when first the volcanic energy shifts itself to a new quarter, is not modern.

Strabo rejects this theory as insufficient to account for all the phenomena, and he proposes one of his own, the profoundness of which modern geologists are only beginning to appreciate.

So, it was argued, the Mediterranean had once opened a passage for itself by the Columns of Hercules into the Atlantic, and perhaps the abundance of sea-shells in Africa, near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, might also be the deposit of some …

level had by this means become so much elevated that it burst its barrier near Byzantium, and formed a communication with the Propontis

observed that the quantity of mud brought down by rivers into the Euxine was so great, that its bed must be gradually raised

Strabo,... enters largely, in the Second Book of his Geography, into the opinions of Eratosthenes and other Greeks on one of the most difficult problems in geology, viz., by what causes marine shells came to be plentifully buried in the …

It seems, then, that the Greeks had not only derived from preceding nations, but had also, in some slight degree, deduced from their own observations, the theory of great periodical revolutions in the inorganic world.

refers to many examples of changes now constantly going on, and insists emphatically on the great results which they must produce in the lapse of ages.

In the Egyptian and Eastern cosmogonies, and in the Greek version of them, no very definite meaning can, in general, be attached to the term 'destruction of the world,' for sometimes it would seem almost to imply the annihilation of our …

an attempt has been made to fancy some analogy between the agents now employed to destroy, renovate, and perpetually vary the earth's surface, and those whereby the first chaotic mass was formed, and brought by supposed nascent energy from …