292 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



10. 



Button. 



appealed to if anybody ventured to doubt the possibility 

 of our being able to carry back our researches to the 

 creation of the present order of things." l Hutton 

 destroyed these characters, which were considered by 

 many as sacred, and declared that in the economy of the 

 world he could find " no traces of a beginning nor signs 

 of an end." And yet, as Lyell has shown, his principles 

 were only imperfectly carried through, for though he 

 maintained that " the strata which now compose our 

 continents have once been beneath the sea, and were 

 formed out of the waste of pre-existing continents," 2 he 

 imagined that when the decay of old continents had 

 furnished the material for new ones these were upheaved 

 by violent and paroxysmal convulsions. He therefore 

 required " alternate periods of general disturbance and 

 repose, and such he believed had been and would for 

 ever be the courses of nature." 3 A strange mixture of 

 the genetic and cyclical views of natural phenomena ! 

 Professor Huxley 4 has explained these seeming incon- 

 sistencies in the theory of Hutton, whom, together with 

 Sir Charles Lyell, he has described as having founded 

 the " uniformitarian " school of geology, by the influence 

 which the discoveries of physical astronomy, brought 

 out at that time by Laplace and his contemporaries, 

 had upon Hutton. Thus Hutton writes : " From seeing 

 revolutions of the planets, it is concluded that there 

 is a system by which they are intended to continue 

 those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds 



1 See Lyell, ' Principles,' 3rd ed., 

 vol. i. pp. 90, 91. 



2 Ibid., p. 89. 3 Lyell, p. 92. 

 4 Huxley, on " Geological Re- 



form," quotes largely from Button's 

 'Theory of the Earth' (1758) and 

 Playfair's ' Illustrations of the Hut- 

 tonian Theory ' (1802). 



