Of relevance to the thread, and somewhat tangential to the point in the quote, (this is also a useful passage to point out to anyone claiming that the idea of an old earth was to support evolution):
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This is from Michael Tuomey’s Report on the Geology of South Carolina (pp. 58-59), from 1848. The immediately prior pages argue against Lamarkian evolution, and for the best-fit model of the time, individual creation of species, but note that there are some components of the fossil record that look somewhat like Lamarkian-style evolution. [To avoid a bad counter-argument for a third time, the geologist who died in 1857 was not the same person as the Tammany Hall politician who was still active in the 1870s.]