GEOLOGIES AND DELUGES. 249 



naturally be expected to be accompanied by earthquakes, but there 

 is nothing to lead us to suppose that these would be on a much 

 grander scale than those of the present. During its slow eleva- 

 tion, the mountain range would be exposed to wind and weather, 

 rain and rivers would carve it out into ridges and valleys, and 

 frost would splinter its peaks into spires and pinnacles. Subse- 

 quently it would sink beneath the sea, and the waves of the sea, 

 as they battered down its cliffs, would remove the last remnants 

 which had escaped the rain and rivers, and roll over an unbroken 

 plain. On this plain, as it continued slowly to subside beneath 

 the sea, the immense deposits of the trias, lias, lower oolites, and 

 Oxford clay would be piled up. 



If the rise of the sea floor into the Bristol Alps took place 

 slowly, and involved a great lapse of time, so equally did the 

 sinking of the land to form the sea floor afresh, and in this long 

 interval time was afforded for great changes in the organic 

 world ; and thus we reach an explanation of the great and strik- 

 ing differences which distinguish the fossils of the carboniferous 

 rocks from those of later date. 



There is no insuperable difliculty in this explanation ; its great 

 merit lies in its accordance with the course of Nature as we ob- 

 serve it at the present day ; and henceforward it became the 

 motto of geology that the processes of the present furnish the 

 key to the interpretation of the past. The changes in which the 

 life of the earth is manifest are not only slow and gradual now, 

 but they have ever been the same. The earthquakes, which in an- 

 cient times shook the land, were no more violent than those of 

 which we have lately read in the daily newspapers ; the ancient 

 volcanoes were not more terrible in their outbursts than Kraka- 

 toa ; floods were not more appalling than those which still from 

 time to time sweep away tens or even hundreds of thousands of 

 human beings from the Ganges plain, and the earth, instead of 

 falling into convulsions every now and then, proceeds on the 

 even tenor of her way, without haste and without rest, preserv- 

 ing a uniformity in her progress which impresses us with its 

 solemn grandeur, but which sometimes seems a trifle monotonous. 

 From its belief that an unbroken uniformity in the operations of 

 Nature extends from the present into the most remote past, geol- 

 ogy now came to be called " uniformitarian." It was no longer 

 theologic, no longer catastrophic, and, I am sorry to add, no 

 longer cosmologic. It persistently refused to inquire into the 

 early history of our planet, and restricting its study to the acces- 

 sible parts of the earth's crust, it abdicated its regal position as 

 the science of the earth, arrd became as it were a mere petty chief- 

 tain, dealing only with rocks and the fossils they contain; the 

 fossils, by the way, not rightly belonging to its province at all. 



