2 50 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



And it was because it passed from being a science of the earth to 

 become a mere study of rocks and fossils that Hutton was able 

 to make his famous declaration that as a result of his inquiries 

 into the system of Nature he could discover "no vestige of a 

 beginning, no prospect of an end." Apart from this, however, 

 and in its self-limited career, geology pursued a luminous ad- 

 vance, and as it did so the Noachian deluge began to sink into an 

 oblivion which it might be thought to have scarcely merited. 

 For if the biblical account is to be taken literally, it furnishes us 

 with a catastrophe of the first order ; and since it is said to have 

 occurred comparatively recently, or at least in historic time, the 

 uniformitarian, by his own principles, would have been com- 

 pelled to infer, as the catastrophist had done, that such deluges 

 form a part of the orderly scheme of the world. The univer- 

 sality of the deluge had, however, for various reasons, been 

 denied, not only by geologists, but by writers of other schools 

 of thought, and toward the middle of the century belief in it 

 among the learned was gradually expiring ; such a number and 

 variety of convincing arguments as converged against it could 

 indeed but lead to that result ; and that the deluge, so far from 

 being universal, was a local and very local phenomenon, became 

 an article of belief so settled among all good geologists and I 

 think I may add theologists that it may be said to have finally 

 fallen into the deep slumber of a decided opinion, from which I 

 for one have no desire to arouse it. 



Thus the deluge, so far from shaking the uniformitarian posi- 

 tion, was rather itself submerged by uniformitarian views, and 

 growing geology was in danger of taking the uniformitarian for- 

 mula for an infallible dogma. It was saved from this by physics, 

 a clever brother of its own, which had now discovered the famous 

 principle of the " conservation of energy," and another equally 

 famous, "the dissipation of energy." From these it was dedu- 

 cible that the duration of the earth as a living planet must be 

 strictly limited in time. It must have had a beginning, and at 

 the beginning was furnished with a store of energy, which it 

 has ever since been spending. In this spending of energy its life 

 consists, and when the store is at length exhausted its life will 

 cease, and it will become numbered among the dead planets. 



A good deal of this uniformitarian geology might perhaps 

 itself have guessed, had it extended its views beyond rocks and 

 fossils to the stars and other shining bodies which people the 

 vast realms of space. The present, then, strange to say, will still 

 afford a key to the past. We have but to turn to the sun, our 

 nearest luminary, though still more thdTn ninety millions of miles 

 away from us, and in that great orb we find much to suggest the 

 state of our planet some ninety millions of years ago or more. 



