Read The Syme Papers for Free Online

complexities, which a simple demonstration, or personal assurance, could pass over in a minute. He lived on in the memories of his students, and their more patient pens; they returned, again and again, to hear him lecture. I cannot help but think of that old line: ‘somehow they were never the same to him/When they were married and brought their wives.’
    He died childless in 1817, lecturing until the end, married only to the college whose rise he had overseen. Yet Werner’s most famous student – his successor at Freiberg, Friedrich Mohs, inventor of degrees of hardness, both geological and psychological – fled at the first opportunity for Vienna and greener pastures; and the Freiberg Academy suffered a long decline through the nineteenth century.
    One notable student remained truer to his master. Werner’s theories have been ably set down by Robert Jameson, the Scottish son of a soap-boiler, who was inspired by the tale of Robinson Crusoe to follow a career in geology, and who journeyed to Freiburg to effect an initiation. Jameson left this testament to Werner’s example and the nature of the discipline the great man left behind him.
    We now come to the consideration of Geognosy, regarding the Internal Structure of the earth, and the peculiar province of the celebrated WERNER.
    At first sight the solid mass of the earth appears to be a confused assemblage of rocky masses piled on each other without order or regularity: to the superficial observer, Nature appears, in the apparently rude matter of the inorganic kingdom, as presenting us only with a picture of chaos.
    Our knowledge of the internal structure of the earth remained a great time very limited and confused. Although observations had been made in very distant countries, and similar rocks discovered in a variety of the most widely distant situations, no successful attempt had been made to generalize these appearances, so as to discover the general structure of the earth, and its mode of formation. The attention of Geology was too much occupied with particular and local appearances, to effect what has been since so fully accomplished by the comprehensive mind of WERNER. (My own sin that  – attention too much occupied with partic ular and local appearances.)
    That illustrious mineralogist, to whom we owe almost every thing that is truly valuable in this important branch of knowledge, after the most arduous and long-continued investigations, conducted with the most consummate address, discovered the general structure of the crust of the globe, and pointed out the true mode of examining and ascertaining those great relations, which it is one of the principal objects of Geognosy to investigate.
    We should form a very false conception of the Wernerian Geognosy were we to believe it to have any resemblance to those monstrosities known under the name of Theories of the Earth. Almost all the compositions of this kind are idle speculations, contrived in the closet, and having no kind of resemblance to any thing in nature. Place one of these speculators in the full storm and terror of the living world, and you will immediately discover the nature of his information. He himself will find that he knows nothing; that he has been wandering in the mazes of error; and that, however ever easily he may have been able to explain the formation of this globe, and of the whole universe from his study win dow, he cannot, standing upright in the winds of Heaven, give a rational or satisfactory account of a single mountain.
    Indeed, our researches on the surface of the earth often lead us among the grandest and most sublime works of nature; and amid Alpine groups, the geognosist is, as it were, conducted nearer to the scene of those great operations, which it is his business to explore. In the midst of such scenes, he feels his mind invigorated; the magnitude of the appearances before him extinguishes all the little and contracted notions he may have formed from books. And he learns