Key to the geology of the globe Author:Richard Owen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII. Ethical Geology: Summary and Correlative Inferences, presenting some practical suggestions, deduced from the foregoing laws, as to the most effe... more »ctive means of improving the physical, mental, and moral condition of the Human Race. Having, in the previous chapters, endeavored to exhibit briefly, yet somewhat in detail, such facts as occurred to me regarding the subjects there discussed, and feeling that those ideas were often presented with abrupt transitions, and in very disconnected form, the design, in this chapter, is to condense the whole, and attempt to present the data and inferences in a more consecutive and systematic form. Commencing with the collated data according to the order of the chapters, we may comprise them in the following which, it is hoped, in connection with the large Tabular Synopsis, or Diagram VI., will serve to make the attempted generalization or systematic comparison as intelligible as can at present be expected ; until extended time and observation have aided, either in rendering the whole so plain and full of truth-evidences that few,if any, will doubt; or in offering such a collection of more abundant antagonistic facts as will conclusively prove the supposed generalization to embrace a minority of facts, and consequently to be only a systematic arrangement of exceptions to the general laws governing the universe. Even during the short period devoted to writing this essay, as the work progressed, I saw some facts more clearly working themselves into the generalization than was at first apparent. Occasionally, therefore, as might naturally be expected, I have had somewhat to modify details, although never to alter the fundamental principles of generalization. When any such discrepancies or conflicts are visible, the statem...« less