1898] NFAV SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARBANGEMENT 39 



present experience. Where, to take a very simple and obvious and 

 recent case, can we in all that record match the boulder phenomena 

 of the drift which extends over two continents, and does so inde- 

 pendently of the contour of the country ? No current phenomenon 

 gives us even a hint as to how it was produced. Where, again, in 

 human memory can we find among the phenomena of nature any- 

 thing to compare to the great outbursts of basalt and tracliyte which 

 smother whole empires in India and South America with continuous 

 tabular masses, and which have burst out of the ground by methods 

 and processes apparently no longer active ? Where can we match 

 the manufacture of granite, the outflow of veins of quartz, the toss- 

 ing of a huge mountain like the Eigi on end, the crumpling and re- 

 versing of the hardest crystalline rocks as if they were butter, such as 

 we pass on our way to St Gothard, the breaking up of the chalk 

 beds of East Anglia and of Denmark. These are mere samples of 

 the effects of forces and of conditions which are no longer active, or 

 rather have not been active within human memory. Potentially 

 they may exist, no doubt, but they can no longer be seen at work. 

 What is to be said for a President of the British Association, who 

 was also President of the Geological Society, who in the face of such 

 facts could deliberately lay it down that nature has always worked, 

 not only by the same methods but with the same intensity that she 

 does now ? Uniformity, in the sense here defined, the idol of the 

 modern geologist, underlying his teaching and the prime postulate 

 of his philosophy, is as much a scholastic and ridiculous ci priori 

 prejudice as that ' all swans must be white,' that ' antipodes are im- 

 possible,' or that short-haired women and long-haired men must 

 be exceptionally gifted. 



Again, geology is a very complex science : it embodies crystallo- 

 graphy, mineralogy, petrology, and biology. Some of its problems 

 necessitate a training in mathematics, in mechanics, in physics, and 

 in chemistry. They cannot be solved without such training; and 

 yet is there any study on which so many uneducated men venture 

 to write with the greatest assurance and impertinence ? It is simply 

 appalling to think how many men who have never been out of 

 England lay down the most extravagant conclusions about pheno- 

 mena that cannot be studied empirically at all in England. How 

 many men whose training just enables them to map a country or to 

 draw a section (assuredly a very elementary kind of land surveying, 

 which few sharp boys at fifteen could not acquire), think that this 

 entitles them to attribute the most astounding and purely imaginary 

 qualities and properties to matter. Men who have never seen a glacier 

 and never experimented upon ice in the laboratory, have published, 

 and continue to publish, endless reams of unutterable rubbish about 

 ice sheets and the movements and properties of ice, entirely based on 



