PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE WAR-PATH. 7 8 7 



single human life, that we are all apt to be a little drunk with 

 our own success. And yet that progress has been marked by inci- 

 dents which should make us sober. The field, though a small 

 one, on which its victories have been achieved, is strewn with the 

 bodies of the slain. Dead theories and abandoned speculations 

 lie thick upon the ground, while some of the most mischievous 

 preconceptions still encumber the progress of inquiry. One of the 

 first great general conceptions which lifted the speculations of mere 

 cosmogony to the dignity of a science, was the Huttonian theory.* 

 One part of it was securely true. Another part of it was pro- 

 foundly false. It was true as regards the continuity of causes. It 

 was also as regards the uniformity of their effects. It was true 

 that the rocks have been built up by the interaction of the forces 

 of elevation, and the forces of degradation and depression. It 

 was true that the causes which heaved the hills, have been ever 

 met and checked by causes which wore them down again. But it 

 was not true that the operation of higher laws is never indicated, 

 or that all we can ascertain is limited to a perpetual seesaw of 

 monotonous repetition. As usual, there were many minds which 

 valued the Huttonian theory not for its truths, but mainly for its 

 deficiencies and errors. The school of thought that delights to 

 shut out those fountains of power from which all thought has 

 come, were enchanted with a conception which reduced creation 

 to the dull rounds of mechanical necessity. It was enthusiastic 

 over the famous formula that geology saw " no trace of a begin- 

 ning, no symptom of an end." In this form it may be called the 

 great hurdy-gurdy theory. Then came the discovery of a clew 

 by which an order of succession could be established in time, and, 

 with time, in the perpetual introduction of new forms of life. Of 

 course the mechanists set to work again, and they are at work 

 still. Lyell supplied them with the only philosophical basis on 

 which they can stand at all, and preached the doctrines of uni- 

 formity with immense knowledge and with infinite skill. As in 

 the previous case of the theory of Hutton and of Play fair, much 

 of what he taught was true, while the errors and exaggerations of 

 his teachings are now being gradually but surely left behind. 

 " The bit-by-bit theory of our friend Lyell will never account for 

 all our facts," was the observation made to me one day by Lyell's 

 compatriot, friend, and equal, Sir Roderick Murchison. On this 

 subject happily there is no need of controversy with Prof. Huxley. 

 He has himself taken a creditable part in checking extreme opin- 

 ions and in showing that the doctrine of uniformity, in the only 

 sense in which it can be rationally held, is quite consistent with 

 any amount of catastrophe and convulsion. In fact, the recur- 



* Theory of the Earth, by James Hutton, M. D., 1795. 



