Huttonian Theory. 81 



era, is a point on which, in the present infancy of the science, 

 it would be idle to speculate. Of this, however, we may feel 

 assured, that the greater the identity of the system of terres- 

 trial changes, present and future, organic and inorganic, with 

 that which has prevailed throughout past time, the more 

 faithfully shall we be able to interpret the records of creation 

 which are written on the framework of the globe. 



Huttonian Theory. 



In the first publication of the Huttonian theory, it was de- 

 clared that we can neither see the beginning nor the «nd of 

 that vast series of phenomena which it is our business as 

 geologists to investigate. After sixty years of renewed in- 

 quiry, and after we have greatly enlarged the sphere of our 

 knowledge, the same conclusion seems to me to hold true. 

 But if any one should appeal to such results in support of the 

 doctrine of an eternal succession, I may reply that the evi- 

 dence has become more and more decisive in favour of the 

 recent origin of our own species. The intellect of man and 

 his spiritual and moral nature are the highest works of crea- 

 tive power known to us in the universe, and to have traced 

 out the date of their commencement in past time, to have 

 succeeded in referring so memorable an event to one out of 

 a long succession of periods, each of enormous duration, is 

 perhaps a more wonderful achievement of Science, than it 

 would be to have simply discovered the dawn of vegetable or 

 animal life, or the precise time when, out of chaos, or out of 

 nothing, a globe of inanimate matter was first formed.* 



On the former Changes of the Alps. By Sir RODERICK Impey 

 MuRCHisojs^, F.R.S.t 



The complicated structure of the Alps so baffled the pene- 

 tration of De Saussure, that after a life of toil the first great 

 historian of those mountains declared " there was nothing 

 constant in them except their variety." In citing this opinion, 

 Sir Roderick explained how the obscurity had been gradually 



* The anti-development view of Fossil Plants, in our next Number, 

 t Abstract of a Memoir read to the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in 

 March 7, 1851. 



