Knowledge of Paleogeography would meet with a state
of things very similar to that which now obtains; but that the
likeness of the past to the present would gradually become less
and less, in proportion to the remoteness of his period of
observation from the present day; that the existing distribution
of mountains and plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself
to be the product of a slow process of natural change operating
upon more and more widely different antecedent conditions of the
mineral frame-work of the earth; until, at length, in place of
that frame-work, Paleogeography would represent
only a vast nebulous mass, representing the constituents of
the sun and of the planetary bodies.
