290 EVOLUTIONAL GEOLOGY. 



declared that he found no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end iJ 

 It would have been marvelous if he had! Consider that when Hutton's 

 "Theory"' was published William Smith's famous discovery had not 

 been made, and that nothing was then known of the orderly- succes- 

 sion of forms of life, which it is one of the triumphs of geology to 

 have revealed; consider, too, the existing state of physics at the time, 

 and that the modern theories of energy had still to be fornudated; 

 consider also that spectroscopv had not yet lent its aid to astronomy 

 and the consequent ignorance of the nature of nebula?; and then, if 

 3'ou will, cast a stone at Hutton. AVith L^'ell, however, the case was 

 different; in pressing his uniformitarian creed upon geology he 

 omitted to take into account the great advances made by its sister sci- 

 ences, although he had knowledge of them, and thus sinned against 

 the light. In the last edition of the famous "Principles" we read: 

 "It is a favorite dogma of some physicists that not only the earth, but 

 the sun itself, is continually losing a portion of its heat, and that as 

 there is no known source by which it can be restored we can foresee 

 the time when all life will cease to exist on this planet, and on the other 

 hand we can look back to a period when the heat was so intense as to 

 be incompatible with the existence of any organic beings such as are 

 known to us in the living or fossil world. * * * A geologist in 

 search of some renovating power by which the amount of heat may be 

 made to continue unimpaired for millions of years, past and future, in 

 the solid parts of the earth * * * has been compared b}- an emi- 

 nent physicist to one who dreams he can discover a source of perpetual 

 motion and invent a clock with a self-winding apparatus. But wh}" 

 should we despair of detecting proofs of such regenerating and self- 

 sustaining power in the works of a Divine Artificer?'- Here we catch 

 the true spirit of uniformity; it admittedly regards the universe as a 

 self-winding clock, and l)arely conceals a conviction that the clock was 

 warranted to keep true Greenwich time. The law of the dissipation of 

 energy is not a dogma, but a doctrine drawn from observation, while the 

 uniformity of Lyell is in no sense an induction; it is a dogma in the nar- 

 rowest sense of the word, unproved, incapable of proof; hence perhaps 

 its power upon the human mind; hence also the transitoriness of that 

 power. Again, it is onl}^ by restricting its inquiries to the stratified 

 rocks of our planet that the dogma of uniformity can be maintained 

 with any pretense of argument. Directh^ we begin to search the 

 heavens the possibility, na}^ even the likelihood, of the nebular origin 

 of our system, with all that it involves, is borne in upon us. L3'ell 

 therefore consistently refused to extend his gaze beyond the rocks 

 beneath his feet, and was thus led to do a serious injury to our science; 

 he severed it from cosmogony, for which he entertained and expressed 

 the most profound contempt, and from the mutilation thus infiicted 

 geology is onl}^ at length making a slow and painfid recover3\ Why 



