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Excerpt from The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., F. R. S: Sometime Dean of Westminster, Twice President of the Geological Society, and First President of the British Association The century now drawing to a close is remarkable beyond all others for the spirit of inquiry into the physical constitution of the earth, into the forces playing • upon its surface, and into the phenomena of life, both plant, and animal. The rise of the natural sciences in the modem sense may be said to date from its beginning. In this. great renascence geology has borne an important part. It has opened out new and almost endless avenues of thought, giving us, on the one hand, the history of the ever-changing earth, from the remote time when it was sufficiently cool to allow of water resting upon its surface, and, on the other, the long and orderly procession of animal life beginning with the lowest invertebrate forms and ending in Man. In this latter connection it enabled Darwin to grasp the principle of evolution that now influences our view of life as a whole in the same way as the law of gravitation has affected our view of matter, not only in the earth, but also in the universe. To us, living at the end of the century, it is difficult to realise the conditions under which the pioneers lived and worked, because through their labours the conditions have wholly changed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain