Abstract
UNDER the above title Dr. Page has published two essays which are devoted to an exposition of the chief scientific results, and a vindication of the economic value and importance, of geological research. The somewhat rhetorical style of these essays is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that they were originally prepared by their author as popular lectures for an Edinburgh audience—a disposition of them which was frustrated by his ill-health. Dr. Page has very effectively grouped, and eloquently sustained his several theses, while many of the chief points of his discourses are rendered more telling by admirably chosen illustrations from the immediate neighbourhood of the city in which the lectures were to have been delivered. In one or two instances, however, we notice that the author has not succeeded in avoiding the danger of making his generalisations of too sweeping a character—as for example when he informs us, without any qualification, that “men need not search for the veined marbles of the metamorphic rocks in tertiary beds, for metalliferous veins in secondary strata, nor for workable coal-seams in the Old Red Sandstone and Silurian systems.”
Geology: its Influence on Modern Beliefs.
Being a Popular Sketch of its Scientific Teachings and Economic Bearings. By David Page. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1876.)
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[Book Reviews]. Nature 14, 504 (1876). https://doi.org/10.1038/014504b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/014504b0