xii] OF EVOLUTION 153 



catastrophism of its youth ; in becoming evolutional it 

 does not cease to remain essentially uniformitarian 149 .' 

 Alfred Russel Wallace, who has always been as 

 stout a defender of the views of Lyell as he has of 

 those of Darwin, has given me his permission to quote 

 from a letter he wrote me in 1888. After referring 

 to what he regards as the weak and mistaken attacks 

 on Lyell's teachings, ' which have of late years been 

 so general among geologists/ he says : 



' I have always been surprised when men have advanced the 

 view that volcanic action must have been greater when the earth 

 was hotter, and entirely ignore the numerous indications that 

 both subterranean and meteorological forces, even in Palaeozoic 

 times, were of the same order of magnitude as they are now and 

 this I have always believed is what Lyell's teaching implies.' 



I believe that Mr Wallace's expression, adopted 

 from the mathematicians, 'the same order of magni- 

 tude/ would have met with Lyell's complete ac- 

 quiescence. He was not so unwise as to suppose 

 that, in the limited periods of human history, we 

 must necessarily have had experience even at 

 Krakatoa or 'Skaptar Jokull' of nature's greatest 

 possible convulsions, but he fought tenaciously 

 against any admission of ' cataclysms' that would 

 belong to a totally different category to those of the 

 present day. 



Apart from theological objections, the most for- 

 midable obstacle to the reception of evolutionary 



