100 SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE in 



alterations in the habitable surface, and then to give rise, during 

 a very brief period, to important revolutions (vol. ii. p. 161). l 



Lyell quarrelled with the catastrophists then, 

 by no means because they assumed that catas- 

 trophes occur and have occurred, but because 

 they had got into the habit of calling on their 

 god Catastrophe to help them, when they ought 

 to have been putting their shoulders to the wheel 

 of observation of the present course of nature, in 

 order to help themselves out of their difficulties. 

 And geological science has become what it is, 

 chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted 

 Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts. 



So far as I know anything about the matter, 

 there is nothing that can be called proof, that the 

 causes of geological phenomena operated more in- 

 tensely or more rapidly, at any time between the 

 older tertiary and the oldest palaeozoic epochs 

 than they have done between the older tertiary 

 epoch and the present day. And if that is so, 

 uniformitarianism, even as limited by Lyell, 2 has no 



1 See also vol. i. p. 460. In the ninth edition (1853), pub- 

 lished twenty-three years after the first, Lyell deprives even the 

 most careless reader of any excuse for misunderstanding him : 

 "So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the 

 perpetual uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth- 

 crust is quite consistent with the admission of their alternate 

 development and suspension for indefinite periods within limited 

 geographical areas " (p. 187). 



2 A great many years ago (Presidential Address to the Geo- 

 logical Society, 1869) I ventured to'indicate that which seemed 

 to me to be the weak point, not in the fundamental principles 

 of uniformitarianism, but in uniformitarianism as taught by 

 Lyell. It lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a 



