Volume 183501

Principles of geology, being an inquiry how far the former changes of the earth's surface are referable to causes now in operation / By Charles Lyell, Esq. F.R.S. President of the Geological Society of London ... In four volumes.

  • Lyell, Charles, Sir, 1797-1875.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles of geology, being an inquiry how far the former changes of the earth's surface are referable to causes now in operation / By Charles Lyell, Esq. F.R.S. President of the Geological Society of London ... In four volumes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sence of such data, an attempt has been made to fancy some analogy between the agents now employed to destroy, renovate, and perpetually vary the earth’s sur- face, and those whereby the first chaotic mass was formed, and brought by supposed nascent energy from the embryo to the habitable state. By how many shades the elaborate systems, con- structed on these principles, may differ from the mys- teries of the “Mundane Egg” of Egyptian fable, I shall not inquire. It would, perhaps, be dangerous ground ; and some of our contemporaries might not sit as patiently as the Athenian audience, when the fiction of the chaotic egg, engrafted by Orpheus upon their own mythology, was turned into ridicule by Aristo- phanes. That comedian introduced his birds singing, in a solemn hymn, “ How sable-plumaged Night con- ceived in the boundless bosom of Erebus, and laid an egg, from which, in the revolution of ages, sprung Love, resplendent with golden pinions. Love fecun- dated the dark-winged chaos, and gave origin to the race of birds.” * Pythagorean Doctrines. — Pythagoras, who resided for more than twenty years in Egypt, and, according to Cicero, had visited the East, and conversed with the Persian philosophers, introduced into his own country, on his return, the doctrine of the gradual de- terioration of the human race from an original state of virtue and happiness: but if we are to judge of his theory concerning the destruction and renovation of the earth from the sketch given by Ovid, we must concede it to have been far more philosophical than any known version of the cosmologies of oriental or Egyptian sects. | * Aristophanes, Birds, 694.