14 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. viii. 



evidence of change, or physical or organic action, whether sudden 

 or gradual, as a geological course, provided it could he shown to 

 be or to have been a natural fact. Farther, no one was more 

 fully impressed with the continual change and progress in nature, 

 and with the necessity of taking into account the different con- 

 ditions of different geological times, in applying any modern 

 cause to account for ancient phenomena, 



A second and still more mischievous misapprehension is that 

 of regarding his method as similar to that style of analogical 

 reasoning which Spencer and Darwin have made so current in 

 our time. When Lyell strove to illustrate the conditions of the 

 Coal period by those of the great Dismal Swamp, for example, 

 his argument was one of analogy, but an analogy in which the 

 main conditions could be proved to be identical. In both cases 

 they were swamp conditions, though separated by a great lapse 

 of time. He never would have -reasoned, like Spencer, that the 

 evolution of an egg explains the evolution of animals in geologi- 

 cal time; because in this case the similarity of conditions which 

 can alone give value to a natural analogy is wholly absent. Nor 

 does the Lyellian philosophy properly admit the assumption, as a 

 vera causa of past geological change, of processes supposed to be 

 going on, but so slowly that human experience fails to obtain 

 any measure of them, or even any certainty as to their reality. 

 It is true that, in the later editions of the Principles, Sir Charles 

 admits the force of Darwin's arguments for the transmutation of 

 species, and devotes large space to their exposition ; and he 

 states, as his general conclusion, that Darwin, "without abso- 

 lutely proving this, has made it appear in the highest degree 

 probable;" but I do not find that he ever regarded these bril- 

 liant speculations as occupying the same stable ground with his 

 own grand general conclusions as to the persistency of existing 

 causes in geological time. Lyell, in short, while a uniformita- 

 rian rather than a cataclysmist, held to uniformity not of effects, 

 but of the general laws of causation ; and the analogies by which 

 he sought to connect modern changes with those which had left 

 their monuments on the earth's crust, had nothing in common 

 with those on which theories of transmutation of species have 

 been based. 



It is always an interesting inquiry in the case of a great stu- 

 dent of nature, to ask what position he took in regard to those 

 higher problems which directly affect man in his mental, mora 



