XL] GEOLOGICAL REFORM. 211 



justice insisted upon a practically unlimited bank of time, ready 

 to discount any quantity of hypothetical paper. It has kept 

 before our eyes the power of the infinitely little, time being 

 granted, and has compelled us to exhaust known causes, before 

 flying to the unknown. 



To my mind there appears to be no sort of necessary theo 

 retical antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarian- 

 ism. On the contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes 

 may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my 

 case by analogy. The working of a clock is a model of uniform 

 action ; good time-keeping means uniformity of action. But the 

 striking of the clock is essentially a catastrophe ; the hammer 

 might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a 

 deluge of water ; and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead 

 of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular 

 periods, never twice alike, in the intervals, force, or number of 

 its blows. Nevertheless, all these irregular, and apparently 

 lawless, catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uni- 

 formitarian action; and we might have two schools of clock- 

 theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the 

 pendulum. 



Still less is there any necessary antagonism between either of 

 these doctrines and that of Evolution, which embraces all that 

 is sound in both Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism, while it 

 rejects the arbitrary assumptions of the one and the, as arbitrary, 

 limitations of the other. Nor is the value of the doctrine of 

 Evolution to the philosophic thinker diminished by the fact that 

 it applies the same method to the living and the not-living 

 world ; and embraces, in one stupendous analogy, the growth of 

 a solar system from molecular chaos, the shaping of the earth 

 from the nebulous cubhood of its youth, through innumerable 

 changes and immeasurable ages, to its present form ; and the 

 development of a living being from the shapeless mass of 

 protoplasm we term a germ. 



I do not know whether Evolutionism can claim that amount 

 of currency which would entitle it to be called British popular 



P 2 



