In the Museum of Economic Geology, in Jermyn Street, may be seen ores,
metals, rocks, and whole suites of fossils stratigraphically arranged
in such a manner that, with an observant eye for form, all may easily
understand the more obvious scientific meanings of the Succession
of Life in Time, and its bearing on geological economies. It is
perhaps scarcely an exaggeration to say, that the greater number of
so-called educated persons are still ignorant of the meaning of this
great doctrine. They would be ashamed not to know that there are many
suns and material worlds besides our own; but the science, equally
grand and comprehensible, that aims at the discovery of the laws that
regulated the creation, extension, decadence, and utter extinction of
many successive species, genera, and whole orders of life, is ignored,
or, if intruded on the attention, is looked on as an uncertain and
dangerous dream,--and this in a country which was almost the nursery of
geology, and which for half a century has boasted the first Geological
Society in the world.--_Saturday Review_, No. 140.