Abstract
IN entering upon the duties of this Chair I can hardly do better, perhaps, than try to set before you what are the primary aims and general hearings of that branch of natural science which we are about to study, and to indicate the nature of the problems with which it deals. In doing so I will endeavour at the same time to point out the methed of research and the mode of reasoning which we must pursue if we are to be successful investigators. Geology (in which comprehensive term I include mineralogy and palæontology), is concerned in the first place with observations of minerals, rocks, and fossil organic remains, and in the second place with the inferences which may be drawn from those observations. Its object is thus not only to note the nature and position of the various materials which constitute the solid crust of our globe, but by processes of inductive and deductive reasoning to ascertain how minerals and rocks have been formed and caused to assume the different appearances which they now present. In few words, then, our science might be defined as an inquiry into the history or development of the earth's crust, and of the several floras and faunas which have clothed and peopled its surface. It thus treats of the genesis of oceanic and continental areas—of mutations of climate—of the appearance and disappearance of successive tribes of plants and animals. More than this, in revealing the past it throws strong light upon the present, and has, perhaps, more than any of the cognate sciences, tended to revolutionise our conceptions of nature, and to lead zoologists and botanists iato fruitful fields of inquiry which their own proper studies, no matter how assiduously prosecuted, could never have enabled them to reach.
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The Aims and Method of Geological Inquiry 1 . Nature 27, 44–46 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/027044a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/027044a0