1 82 HUTTONIAN THEORY 



fell and glaciers crept as they do to-day. Ice scored 

 and polished rocks exactly as it still does among the 

 Alps and in Norway. There was nothing abnormal 

 in the phenomena save the scale on which they were 

 manifested. And thus, taking a broad view of the 

 whole subject, although we cannot yet explain the 

 origin of the catastrophe, we see in its progress the 

 operation of natural processes which we know to be 

 integral parts of the machinery whereby the surface 

 of the earth is still continually transformed. 



Among the debts which science owes to the 

 Huttonian school, not the least memorable is the 

 promulgation of the first well-founded conceptions of 

 the high antiquity of the globe. Some six thousand 

 years had previously been usually believed to comprise 

 the whole life of the planet, and indeed of the entire 

 universe. When the curtain was then first raised 

 that had veiled the history of the earth, and men, 

 looking beyond the brief span within which they had 

 supposed that history to have been transacted, beheld 

 the records of a long vista of ages stretching far away 

 into a dim illimitable past, the prospect vividly im- 

 pressed their imagination. Astronomy had made 

 known the immeasurable fields of space ; the new 

 science of geology seemed now to reveal boundless 

 distances of time. The more the terrestrial chronicles 

 were studied the farther could the eye range into an 

 antiquity so vast as to defy all attempts to measure 

 or define it. The progress of research continually 

 furnished additional evidence of the enormous dura- 

 tion of the ages that preceded the coming of man, 

 while, as knowledge increased, periods that were 



