Geology

Geology is an exact science too. Many factors of geological phenomena can be measured and grouped in "correlation structures," aspects of which can be treated mathematically.

All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species–of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus.