UNIFORMITARIAN SCHOOL 205 



conceived, through successive stages to an end which 

 can be foreseen. But the disproof leaves Hutton's 

 doctrine about the vastness of geological time exactly 

 where it was. Surely it was no abuse of language to 

 speak of periods as being vast, which can only be 

 expressed in millions of years. 



It is easy to understand how the Uniformitarian 

 school, which sprang from the teaching of Hutton 

 and Playfair, came to believe that the whole of eternity 

 was at the disposal of geologists. In popular estima- 

 tion, as the ancient science of astronomy was that of 

 infinite distance, so the modern study of geology was 

 the science of infinite time. It must be frankly con- 

 ceded that geologists, believing themselves unfettered 

 by any limits to their chronology, made ample use of 

 their imagined liberty. Many of them, following the 

 lead of Lyell, to whose writings in other respects 

 modern geology owes so deep a debt of gratitude, 

 became utterly reckless in their demands for time, 

 demands which even the requirements of their own 

 science, if they had adequately realised them, did not 

 warrant. The older geologists had not attempted to 

 express their vast periods in terms of years. The in- 

 definiteness of their language fitly denoted the absence 

 of any ascertainable limits to the successive ages with 

 which they had to deal. And until some evidence 

 should be discovered whereby these limits might be 

 fixed and measured by human standards, no reproach 

 could justly be brought against the geological termin- 

 ology. It was far more philosophical to be content, 

 in the meanwhile, with indeterminate expressions, than 

 from data of the weakest or most speculative kind to 



