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VI. — A Physicist on Evolution : being a part of Peofessor 

 Tyndall's Address to the British Association at Belfast. 



Bishop Butler accepted with unwavering trust the chronology 

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

 and 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 revelations regarding the life of 

 the ancient earth, having been created. The rigidity of old con- 

 ceptions has been relaxed, the public mind being rendered gradu- 

 ally tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty 

 thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for seons 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 palaeontologist, 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 Bishoj) Butler cease to have a 

 visual angle. Everybody 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 base- 

 lessness considered scientifically, but their immorality considered 

 as questions of ethics and religion : the Book of Genesis had 

 stated the question in a different 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 reproduce 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 sufler the same inexorable 

 defeat. Sure the time must come at last when human natiu-e 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 



* Only to some ; for there arc dignitaries who even now speak of the earth's 

 rocky crust as so much buildiug material ]jreparcd for man at the Creation. 

 Surely it is time that tliis loose language should cease. 



