212 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Lyell quarreled with the catastrophists, then, by no means because 

 they assumed that catastrophes occur and have occurred, but because 

 they had got into the habit of calling on their god Catastrophe to help 

 them when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the 

 wheel of observation of the present course of Nature, in order to help 

 themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has become 

 what it is chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted Lyell's 

 doctrine and followed his precepts. 



So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that 

 can be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated 

 more intensely or more rapidly at any time between the older Tertiary 

 and the oldest Palaeozoic epochs than they have done between the 

 older Tertiary epoch and the present day. And if that is so, uniformi- 

 tarianism, even as limited by Lyell,* has no call to lower its crest. 

 But, if the facts were otherwise, the position Lyell took up remains 

 impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of Nature 

 were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now ; what he did 

 maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good evi- 

 dence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet been 

 shown to be incorrect. 



I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the " Principles 

 of Geology " in my young days ; and, long before the year 185G, my 

 mind was familiar with the truth that " the doctrine of uniformity is 

 not incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have 

 shown, is taught totidem verbis in that work. Even had it been pos- 

 sible for me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the 

 " Principles," "Whewell's " Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," 

 published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar, 

 must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always pro- 

 found, author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly 

 points out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of 

 catastrophes. 



standing him : " So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual 

 uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth-crust is quite consistent with the 

 admission of their alternate development and suspension for indefinite periods within 

 limited geographical areas" (p. 187). 



* A great many years ago ("Presidential Address to the Geological Society," 1SG9) I 

 ventured to indicate that which seemed to me to be the weak point, not in the funda- 

 mental principles of uniformitarianism, but in uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It 

 lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Ilutton, and in a less degree by Lyell, to look beyond 

 the limits of the time recorded by the stratified rocks. I said: "This attempt to limit, 

 at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things 

 which are to the things which were this faithlessness to its own logic seems to me to 

 have cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geological speculation 

 which it might otherwise have held " (" Lay Sermons," p. 260). The context shows that 

 " uniformitarianism " here means that doctrine, as limited in application by Ilutton and 

 Lyell, and that what I mean by " evolutionism " is consistent and thoroughgoing uniformi- 

 tarianism. 



