VIOLENT ACTION UNPROVED 217 



show that they are founded on actual fact and not 

 on mere theoretical possibility. Such evidence, if it 

 existed, could surely be produced. The chronicle of 

 the earth's history, from a very early period down 

 to the present time, has been legibly written within 

 the sedimentary formations of the terrestrial crust. 

 Let the appeal be made to that register. Does it 

 lend any support to the affirmation that the geological 

 processes are now feebler and slower than they used 

 to be ? If it does, the physicists, we might suppose, 

 would gladly bring forward its evidence as irrefragable 

 confirmation of the soundness of their contention. 

 But the geologists have found no such confirmation. 

 On the contrary, they have been unable to discover 

 any indication that the rate of geological causation has 

 ever, on the whole, greatly varied during the time 

 which has elapsed since the deposition of the oldest 

 stratified rocks. They do not assert that there has 

 been no variation, that there have been no periods of 

 greater activity, both hypogene and epigene. But 

 they maintain that the demonstration of the existence 

 of such periods has yet to be made. They most 

 confidently affirm that whatever may have happened 

 in the earliest ages, throughout the whole vast suc- 

 cession of sedimentary strata nothing has yet been 

 detected which necessarily demands that more violent 

 and rapid action which the physicists suppose to have 

 been the order of nature during the past. 



So far as the potent effects of prolonged denudation 

 permit us to judge, the latest mountain-upheavals were 

 at least as stupendous as any of older date whereof 

 the basal relics can yet be detected. They seem, 



