Mr. Lyell's Address, 413 



organic world has not gone on from all eternity as some philoso- 

 phers had maintained. 



But when conceding the truth of these propositions, I am pre- 

 pared to contest another doctrine which the Professor advocates, 

 namely, tiiat by the aid of geological monuments we can trace back 

 the history of our terraqueous system to times anterior to the first 

 creation of organic beings. If it was reasonable that Hutton should 

 in his time call in question the validity of such a doctrine, whether 

 founded on the absence of organic remains in strata called primary 

 or in granite, still more are we bound, after the numerous facts 

 brought to light by modern geology, to regard the opinion as more 

 than questionable. I observe with pleasure that Dr. Buckland 

 broadly assumes what I have elsewhere termed the metamorphic 

 theory, having stated in his 6th chapter that beds of mud, sand, and 

 gravel, deposited at the bottom of ancient seas,^ have been converted 

 by heat and other subterranean causes into gneiss, mica slate, horn- 

 blende slate, clay slate, and other crystalline schists. But if this 

 transmutation be assumed, it must also be admitted that the oblite- 

 ration of the organic remains, if present, would naturally have ac- 

 companied so entire a change in mineral structure. The absence, 

 then, of organic fossils in crystalline stratified rocks, of whatever 

 age, aftbrds no presumption in favour of the non-existence of ani- 

 mals and plants at remote periods. 



The author, however, in another part of his Treatise contends, 

 that even if the strata called primary once contained organic re- 

 mains, there is still evidence in the fundamental granite of an ante- 

 cedent universal state of fusion, and consequently a period when 

 the existence of the organic world, such as it is known to us, was im- 

 possible. There was, he says, one universal mass of incandescent 

 elements, forming the entire substance of the primaeval globe, 

 wholly incompatible with any condition of life which can be shown to 

 have ever existed on the earth*. Believing as I do in the igneous 

 origin of granite, I would still ask, what proof have we in the earth's 

 crust of a state of total and simultaneous liquefaction either of the 

 granitic or other rocks, commonly called plutonic ? All our evi- 

 dence, on the contrary, tends to show that the formation of granite, 

 like the deposition of the stratified rocks, has been successive, and 

 that different portions of granite have been in a melted state at di- 

 stinct and often distant periods. One mass was solid, and had been 

 fractured before another body of granitic matter was injected into 

 it, or through it in the form of veins. In short, the universal 

 fluidity of the crystalline foundations of the earth's crust can only 

 be understood in the same sense as the universality of the ancient 

 ocean. All the land has been under water, but not all at one 

 time ; so all the subterranean unstratified rocks to which man can 

 obtain access have been melted, but not simultaneously. 



Nor can we affirm that the oldest of the unstratified rocks 



* Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise, vol, i. p. 55. 



