James Croll

Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations James Croll

The Fundamental Problem of Geology.-Geology a Dynamical Science.-The Nature of a Geological Principle.-Theories of Geological Climate.-Geological Climate dependent on Astronomical Causes.-An Important Consideration overlooked.- Abstract of the Line of Argument pursued in the Volume. The Fundamental Problem of Geology.-The investigation of the successive changes and modifications which the earth's crust has undergone during past ages is the province of geology. It will be at once admitted that an acquaintance with the agencies by means of which those successive changes and modifications were effected, is of paramount importance to the geologist. What, then, are those agencies? Although volcanic and other subterranean eruptions, earthquakes, upheavals, and subsidences of the land have taken place in all ages, yet no truth is now better established than that it is not by these convulsions and cataclysms of nature that those great changes were effected. It was rather by the ordinary agencies that we see every day at work around us, such as rain, rivers, heat and cold, frost and snow. The valleys were not produced by violent dislocations, nor the hills by sudden upheavals, but were actually carved out of the solid rock, silently and gently, by the agencies to which we have referred. "The tools," to quote the words of Professor Geikie, "by which this great work has been done are of the simplest and most every-day order-the air, rain, frosts, springs, brooks, rivers, glaciers, icebergs, and the sea. These tools have been at work from the earliest times of which any geological record has been preserved. Indeed, it is out of the accumulated chips and dust which they have made, afterwards hardened into solid rock and upheaved, that the very framework of our continents has been formed.