Excerpt from Report on the Survey of South Carolina: Being the First Annual Report to the General Assembly of South Carolina, Embracing the Progress of the Survey During the Year 1856; With Plates and Maps

Geognosy\is the science which treats of the existing. Constituents of the surface of our globe, while Geology seeks to explain the manner in which they were formed, and their present characters and relative position produced. The difference is, therefore, quite as great as that which separates anatomy from physiology; the one deals with facts or rather with material substances; the other with laws and theories. Geognosy may, consequently, take its stand as a science without the assistance of geology, while the latter could not exist without the former. This report is, therefore, most prominently a geognostic one, the geological theories being only occasionally introduced where they were needed as explanations. The maps are essentially geognostic. Geological maps might be termed those which, like Sir Charles Lyell's, of the tertiary ocean and continent of Europe, represent the distri bution of water and land at any one geological period, or those per. Haps, also, which distinguish between formations referable to distinct ages. Such maps would point out the boundaries of the cretaceous and tertiary formations, of the weald and the oolith. But those, on the contrary, which exhibit the area occupied by each rock, distin guished by its petrographic characters, its composition and external appearance, must be designated as petrographic or geognostic maps. For all practical purposes, to the miner as well as the agriculturist, they are most valuable because they are necessarily more accurate and minute, and because they exhibit the position of rocks of different chemical composition.

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