2ET. 62-63.] EGBERT MALLET. 255 



boyhood "the belief of great purpose and all -wise 

 design." 



On this subject the following letter is interesting : 



ft. Mallet to J. Prestwich. 



ENMOKE, THE GROVE, CLAPHAM ROAD, S.W., 29<A March 1875. 



MY DEAR SIR, Let me thank you for a copy of your Inaug- 

 ural Address, which has been read to me, and from which I 

 have derived great pleasure and instruction. You have touched 

 on none but important and broad questions, and dealt with them 

 ably and well. 



The time has fully come for us to clear our ideas as to those 

 shifty old shibboleths of the past generation, Uniformitarianism 

 and Paroxysmalism, and it delights me much to find you pre- 

 senting a courageous front towards their correction. 



I wish much you could devote a share of your powers to the 

 clear unprejudiced statement and discussion of all the evidence 

 for and against the notion 1 of a glacial epoch and the limits of 

 ice-action at any period. People talk about " the glacial period " 

 much as an older world did about " the golden age " or the mil- 

 lennium, and without a thought as to whether there be or be not 

 evidence of the existence of any one of the three. 



To me the admission presents immense physical and mech- 

 anical difficulties, against which Palseontologieal evidences seem 

 weak and dubious. And the alleged evidences from grooved 

 and scratched rocks, I believe, can be accounted for by other 

 than glacial action. 



Do you not rather overrate the toughness of the inner surface 

 of the globe's crust ? 



A section to true scale across the Pacific Ocean would not be 

 a trough, but an urribo covered by a varying but always relatively 

 thin stratum of water a saucer, not a basin, as I have called it 

 elsewhere (Fourth Eeport, Earthquakes). 



The superior inequalities, however great, will rapidly tend to 

 lessen as we pass farther inwards, and thus the nucleus tends to 

 a perfect spheroid, with increase of depth. 



May I venture to add another remark ? you seem to con- 

 tinue to attach to Hopkins's precession notions and to Sir W. 



