PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S ADDRESS. 669 



the time of Bishop Butler the question was not only agitated but ex- 

 tended. It was seen by the clear-witted men who entered this arena 

 that many of their best arguments applied equally to brutes and men. 

 The bishop's arguments were of this character. He saw it, admitted 

 it, accepted the consequences, and boldly embraced the whole animal 

 world in his scheme of immortality. 



Bishop Butler accepted with unwavering trust the chronology of 

 the Old Testament, describing it as " confirmed by the natural aud 

 civil history of the world, collected from common historians, from the 

 state of the earth, and from the late inventions of arts and sciences." 

 These words mark progress ; they must seem somewhat hoary to the 

 Bishop's successors of to-day.^ It is hardly necessary to inform you 

 that, since his time, the domain of the naturalist has been immensely 

 extended — the whole science of geology, with its astounding revela- 

 tions regarding the life of the ancient earth, having been created. 

 The rigidity of old conceptions has been relaxed, the public mind be- 

 ing rendered gradually tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, 

 nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for leons 

 embracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theatre of 

 life and death. The riddle of the rocks has been read by the geolo- 

 gist and paleontologist, from sub-Cambrian depths to the deposits 

 thickening over the sea-bottoms of to-day. And upon the leaves of 

 that stone-book are, as you know, stamped the characters, plainer and 

 surer than those formed by the ink of history, which carry the mind 

 back into abysses of past time, compared with which the periods 

 which satisfied Bishop Butler cease to have a visual angle. Every- 

 body now knows this ; all men admit it ; still, when they were first 

 broached, these verities of science found loud-tongued denunciators, 

 who proclaimed not only their baselessness considered scientifically, 

 but their immorality considered as questions of ethics and religion : 

 the Book of Genesis had stated the question in a difierent fashion, 

 and science must necessarily go to pieces when it clashed with this 

 authority. And as the seed of the thistle produces a thistle, and 

 nothing else, so these objectors scatter their germs abroad, and repro- 

 duce their kind, ready to play again the part of their intellectual 

 progenitors, to show the same virulence, the same ignorance, to achieve 

 for a time the same success, and finally to suffer the same inexorable 

 defeat. Sure the time must come at last when human nature in its 

 entirety, whose legitimate demands it is admitted science alone cannot 

 satisfy, will find interpreters and expositors of a different stamp from 

 those rash and ill-informed persons who have been hitherto so ready 

 to hurl themselves against every new scientific revelation, lest it should 

 endanger what they are pleased to consider theirs. 



^ Only to some ; for there are dignitaries who even now speak of the earth's rocky 

 crust as so much building-material prepared for man at the Creation. Surely it is time 

 that this loose language should cease. 



