36 NATURAL SCIENCE [Jauuary 



and plants, and the landscape in the process of being actually 

 moulded, as being in every respect a part of the geological record 

 just as much as the Carboniferous beds that underlie the chair on 

 which I am sitting at this moment. Things as they are at this 

 moment represent the very last chapter in the history of the earth, 

 and we can no more separate this chapter from the rest than we can 

 tear a man from his shadow. It is with to-day that we must begin 

 if we are to make any real progress in geological reasoning, and we 

 must reverse the teaching of the orthodox museum-naturalist who 

 raises a great fence between the dead past and the living present. 



Again, another heresy, or rather a reversion from the orthodoxy 

 of to-day to the orthodoxy of fifty or sixty years ago. Reasoning, 

 we have been continually taught, is either deductive or inductive. 

 To some of us deductive reasoning, which is the especial glory of the 

 great German mind that fills our firmament just now with its 

 appalling clouds, is a barren mother, or, if not barren, is a mother 

 that produces monstrous offspring too often to give us any confi- 

 dence in her results. To frame a splendid postulate, far-reaching, 

 uncompromising, audacious, and then laboriously to make God's 

 handiwork in Nature witness to the superior genius of Man, or, in 

 other words, to bend and twist our facts in order to reconcile them 

 with the obiter dicta of some Pope of Science, this is the epidemic 

 from which we daily suffer more and more, and against which the 

 natural instincts of a young and aggressive natural scientist as 

 naturally revolt. We hate all kinds of a priori reasoning in a 

 science like ours. It is not English, it is not rational ; it is German, 

 and it is metaphysical ; and metaphysics, as some of us have found 

 who have spent years in quest of its secrets, is like drinking Bass's 

 beer out of an empty mug, or making love to the Venus of Milo. We 

 abominate every kind of general postulate springing from the innate 

 prejudices of superior men. We include in this the great fetish of 

 the modern geologist, the doctrine of Uniformity. 



The word 'uniformity' has done infinite harm in Geology from the 

 confusion involved in its double meaning. In one sense every man 

 of science is a ' uniformitarian.' Science is very largely the dis- 

 covery or verification of law in the Universe, and the very first 

 and most elementary of its axioms as confirmed by universal ex- 

 perience is the Uniformity of Nature's Laws. We none of us doubt 

 that with the same causes the same effects will follow. We none 

 of us doubt that the same quantity and quality of force acting upon 

 the same materials will produce the same quantity and quality of 

 result. In geology, however, the term ' uniformity ' has acquired an 

 entirely different connotation, which is as illogical and mischievous 

 as it is scouted by the students of other sciences. Lyell, following 

 the guidance of Hutton and of Play fair, converged a great deal of 



