.. Mahon PREFACE. OUR thirst for history is insatiable. The Bible particularly never palls the mind in repetition, because it figures out to us the records of our physical, religious, and social histories in which our best interests are commingled not less for our mental consolation and moral instruction, than our delight. Nor is it less a cause of the interest excited by the sacred volume that it gives us information of the earliest existence of man, and of the world to which his mortal career is confined. The mind involuntarily reverts from the vast expanse of the estuary-to the dropping rill from whence the mighty river springs; and a contemplation of the immutable beauties of this earth would be unsatisfactory without we could accompany it by the earliest records of the chaos from which the Al A mighty hand called it into existence. The physical history of the world has, indeed, in all times occupied the researches of the learned, the speculative, or the visionary; and it has too often happened that they have cast themselves, under the influence of imagination, from the solid rock of Holy Writ, into the boundless ocean of bewildering error. Archimedes wished for a fulcrum to move a world; and theorists have exhausted their resources in endeavours to assign causes for events which lie beyond their means of comprehension. Whilst it is our aim to avoid such errors, we cannot but know that considerable boldness of investigation is requisite before we shall faithfully trace the cosmogony of the globe, and draw a true outline of the sequence of changes it has undergone in passing from a chaotic state, to one of order and form, inhabited by a living world, at the head of which is man. But the brief history we wish to submit to the reader in this place is composed of the incidents which partly originated the following treatise on Geology. In the year 1836, at the request of Hyde Clarke, Esq., the projector of the plan of crossing Morecambe Bay by a railway to form a connection with the isolated sea coast of Cumberland, the author made a survey and report on the practicability of effecting that object, and suggested a method similar to that detailed in these pages. This circumstance gave rise to a lengthened epistolary discussion with that gentleman on the nature and influence of tidal action in sedimentary deposition; and on the manner in which it was affected by the laws of conformation incidental to our globe. Having previously bestowed considerable attention on Geological systems, this correspondence awoke all the author's predilections on that subject, and induced him to persevere in their pursuit until the result of his labours attained the following shape. He was the more influenced in investigating Geological dispensations, as their solution materially affected an object of such vital interest to his country, and with which he has long been engrossingly occupied--the silting up and reclamation of estuaries from the dominion of the sea. In his correspondence with Mr. Clarke, many incidents arose which gradually brought to light new and extended views on different portions of the topic; and the author has to express his obligations to that gentleman for suggestions which led to the developement of a general law of tidal action in the organization of the earth. Whilst the author has been enabled to lay before Mr. Clarke an important feature in the formation of harbours and silting up of estuaries, he has great gratification in expressing to that gentleman the pleasure he felt from a correspondence which rendered that an object of amusement and interest, which otherwise would have been solely an affair of dry unassisted investigation. In framing a general scheme of railways for Great Britain, the author of the following work found that it also involved the vital interests of Ireland; and in carrying out a scheme thus enlarged, he found himself constrained, in order to give the entire subject a proper connection, to rest his data upon a Geological theory, somewhat more than he could have wished, however true that theory |