Abstract
DO we know anything about the earth in the beginning of its history—anything of those rock masses on which, as on foundation-stones, the great superstructure of the fossiliferous strata must rest? Palæontologists by their patient industry have deciphered many of the inscriptions, blurred and battered though they be, in which the story of life is engraved on the great stone book of Nature. Of its beginnings, indeed, we cannot yet speak. The first lines of the record are at present wanting—perhaps never will be recovered. But apart from this—before the grass, and herb, and tree, before the “moving creature in the water,” before the “beast of the earth after his kind,”—there was a land and there was a sea. Do we know anything of that globe, as yet void of life? Will the rocks themselves give us any aid in interpreting the cryptogram which shrouds its history, or must we reply that there is neither voice nor language, and thus accept with blind submission, or spurn with no less blind incredulity, the conclusions of the physicist and the chemist?
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The Foundation-Stones of the Earth's Crust 1 . Nature 39, 89–94 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/039089a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039089a0