Page:The Geologist, volume 5.djvu/138

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114
THE GEOLOGIST.

sand feet above their original level, throwing them into high angles, as well as dislocating, fracturing, squeezing, and crumpling them: in this way vast continents and mountain-chains have been formed. On the other hand, movements of depression have plunged beds far below their original level. Both kinds of disturbances have often been followed by extensive climatal changes, which have materially affected the life-system of our planet.

8. Vegetable and animal life has existed on the earth during an immense and undefinable period.

9. The plants and animals, whose remains are entombed so frequently in Aqueous rocks, have in general lived while the deposits containing them were in process of formation.

10. Successive creations and extinctions of plants and animals have taken place; so that, of the innumerable kinds (species) which have been in existence, only a comparatively small number is now living.

11. The life-system of our earth, in its various phases, has undergone "an advance and progress in the main."


REVIEWS.

Works of Julius Schvarcz, Ph.D.

1. A Fajtakerdes Szinvonala három ér elött. Pest, 8vo, 1861.

2. Földtani Elméletek a Hellénségnél nagy sándor Koráig. Pest, 8vo, 1861.

3. Recherches sur les Théories géologiques des Grecs. Mémoire présenté à l'Académie des Sciences. Vienna, 8vo, 1861.

4. Lampsacusi Strato, adalék a tudomány történetehez. Pest, 8vo, 1861.

5. La Géologie Antique, et les Fragments du Clazoménien. Mémoire présenté à la 28e Session du Congrès Scientifique de France. Pest, 4to, 1861.

It is with much pleasure that English geologists and paleontologists receive the intelligence that the controversy on the Origin of Species, carried on with increased vigour and animosity since the publication of Mr. Charles Darwin's deservedly esteemed work, has spread its exciting influence as far as the base of the Carpathians. Dr. Julius Schvarcz, a learned Hungarian, has recently published the works the titles of which we give above, and which embody the matured reflections of the most advanced palæontological school. This gentleman's works are published in the Magyar language; we believe that it is the first time that this ancient Ugrian dialect has been used to disseminate the principles of Natural Selection. The Age of Man, his contemporaneity with the extinct animals, the Abbeville discoveries, and the distribution over the surface of the globe of fossils monkeys, are all discussed in these works with an erudition surprising to English geologists, who are not prepared to find that the warfare carried on in the Zoological Section of the British Association in 1860 attracted attention in Hungarian scientific circles. The principles of Dr. Schvarcz seem ultra-transmutationist. He dates the creation of man to a period far transcending in remoteness the historical period, and endorses the opinions of Sir C. Lyell and Mr. Darwin. The most interesting work of his is that one (Recherches sur les Théories Géologiques des Grecs) in which