Applied Geology

All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species–of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus.

Geology may be defined to be that branch of natural history which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature. It is a science founded on exact observation and careful induction; it may termed the physical history of our globe; it investigates the structure of the planet on which we live and explains the character and causes of the various changes in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature.