208 GEOLOGICAL TIME 



was willing to admit that ' the rapidity of rotation 

 of the earth may be diminishing, that the sun may 

 be waxing dim, or that the earth itself may be cool- 

 ing.' But he went on to add his suspicion that 

 'most of us are Gallios, who care for none of these 

 things, being of opinion that, true or fictitious, they 

 have made no practical difference to the earth, during 

 the period of which a record is preserved in stratified 

 deposits.' 1 



For the indifference which their advocate thus pro- 

 fessed on their behalf most geologists believed that 

 they had ample justification. The limits within which 

 the physicist would circumscribe the earth's history 

 were so vague yet so vast, that whether the time 

 allowed were 400 millions or 100 millions of years 

 did not seem to them greatly to matter. After all, 

 it was not the time that chiefly interested them, but 

 the grand succession of events which the time had 

 witnessed. That succession had been established on 

 observations so abundant and so precise that it could 

 withstand attack from any quarter, and it had taken 

 as firm and lasting a place among the solid achieve- 

 ments of science as could be claimed for any 

 physical speculations whatsoever. Whether the time 

 required for the transaction of this marvellous earth- 

 history was some millions of years more or some 

 millions of years less did not seem to the geologists to 

 be a question on which their science stood in antagon- 

 ism with the principles of natural philosophy, but one 

 which the natural philosophers might be left to settle 

 at their own good pleasure. 



Presidential Address. Quart. Journ. Geo/. Soc, 1869. 



