Casual Geology ¹

Abstract

IN science there can be no orthodoxy, and consequently there are no heresies. Prof. Schwarz's book will be read and circulated, instead of being burnt as a danger to established modes of thought. It will bring, in consequence, a freshness to those who have repeated, year after year, the same explanations of phenomena in their courses of instruction. They will feel much like the humdrum banker, who thinks that he really understands his business, until his son takes him one evening to the theatre, and he meets for the first time with the ideal villains of finance. The planetesimal hypothesis of Chamberlin is held by the present author to enable “one to build up a system of geology without an appeal to the unknown and the unknowable”(p. v). “Unknowable” is a rash word; but there is a pood-deal more of the unknown than of the known in the explanations of earth-structure put forward by Prof. Schwarz. We remember a paper of his, in which the former boundaries of continents and oceans were ingeniously deduced from a rock-fragment discovered in a southern isle. The present work includes speculations of a similar order of magnitude, but the underlying facts are marshalled more strategically, and far bigger battalions are brought into the field.