^66 Antiquity of' the Earth. 



lauded ; an idol, like the predecessors to his own circle. Still, 

 the practical effects of thus reviving the forgotten Italian theory, 

 with those improvements, was great, though even yet limited ; 

 since it found all Europe believing that the ignorance of Werner 

 and his followers was philosophy and geology. 



4. Antiquity of the Earth. 



In his earnestness to assert " the uniformity of nature on a 

 »reat scale," Mr Lyell seems to thirst for an antiquity of this 

 earth even greater thcan that which is indicated by geological 

 phenomena themselves. When he maintains, after Hutton, 

 that we see in geology, as in astronomy, " no mark, either of 

 the commencement or of the termination of the present order ;" 

 when he imphes, that the strata seem to tell us the story of 

 a perpetual recurrence of cycles of change of the same kind ; 

 he appears to forget that the geological series, long and myste- 

 rious as it is, has still a beginning. Is there the shadow of a 

 reason for asserting that the lowest stratified rocks, from the 

 crystalline mica-schist to the greywacke slates, were the result of 

 a series of operations, and of a condition of things like those 

 which gave rise to their successors ? Were these masses produced 

 from the previous continents and seas stocked with their re- 

 spective inhabitants ? If so, what is become of the remnants of 

 these continents, and why do we not see them still supporting 

 these schistose beds thus formed from them ^ And where are 

 the remains of the shell-fish and plants, which, according to the 

 analogy thus asserted, lived at that distant period .? In this case, 

 the phenomena are different from those of the succeeding epochs ; 

 by what rules of philosophising, then, can we assert the causes 

 and conditions to be similar ^ Here we have, however remote, 

 a limit, an origin, a starting-place. Or, if Mr Lyell chooses to 

 have the granite older than slates, the argument is transferable 

 to that rock with still greater urgency. Is it not then most 

 gratuitous to maintain, that the Author of Nature, " has not 

 permitted in his works any symptom of infancy or of old agef 

 If man may go wrong, as Mr Lyell asserts of former theorists, 

 through a disposition to assume that the economy of nature was 

 formerly governed by rules quite different for those now esta- 



