38 NATURAL SCIENCE [January 



was a famous deductive conclusion of the science of the dark ages. 

 We shoot a pellet of lead at a female pheasant. It enters and 

 injures its ovary, and the result is that that female at the next moult 

 virtually adopts the plumage of the male, and every cell secreting 

 colouring matter and pattern in its skin, suddenly and with a 

 tremendous impulse and jump, proceeds at the next moult to secrete 

 an entirely different colour and pattern. We look through our 

 telescopes at a star which, so far as we know, has been twinkling 

 through the ages with one unbroken light, and it suddenly bursts 

 out into flame, a glorified conflagration in which the fire must 

 extend for tens of thousands of miles, a gigantic catastrophe un- 

 measurable by any index we can get hold of here, and you tell me 

 that the course of nature is as monotonous as the conversation of a 

 parrot or of the never-ending imbecilities that make up the small 

 talk of society. The thing is monstrously ridiculous. A comet 

 goes flying through space for hundreds of years along a very 

 oblately defined orbit, and it maintains its form as a more or less 

 globular mass of nebulous matter. Presently it approaches the 

 sun, and for a short time only projects into space a tail hundreds of 

 thousands of miles in length, with a velocity and under conditions 

 which are stupendously marvellous. Is this not an excellent object- 

 lesson in catastrophes ? 



Again, let us turn to another side of the case, namely, 

 the uniformity in the rate of change or in the intensity of the 

 force. Because a child grows two inches a year during its early 

 years, an orthodox geologist ouglit to argue that it does so in old 

 age as well. Because the surface soil in some places grows at a 

 rate to be measured by an inch or two in a thousand years, therefore 

 the Carboniferous beds must have taken millions of years to deposit. 

 As if the famous tree trunks in the Joggins Mines and others we 

 are familiar with in the north, many feet in length and standing 

 upright on their roots, do not make it absolutely plain that some- 

 times the rate of accumulation must have been exceptionally rapid. 

 Because under certain conditions biological changes of a permanent 

 character take a long time to develop, therefore the myriad new 

 forms which the gardener and the breeder of animals has crowded 

 the world with in the last two centuries, must have taken millions 

 of years to produce. 



The fact is that instead of being, as the modern geologist would 

 argue, an exception, catastrophe is an ever-present element in the 

 world's history ; and catastrophes, or what are the same thing, 

 phenomena new, unique and unmatched by experience, are present 

 everywhere in the history of the past, if we will look for them and 

 not put on Lyellian blinkers. The whole course of geology presents 

 us with formations and with problems which we cannot match in our 



