Ill SCIENCE AND PSEUDO -SCIENCE 101 



call to lower its crest. But if the facts were other- 

 wise/the position Ly ell took up remains impregnable. 

 He did not say that the geological operations of 

 nature were never more rapid, or more vast, than 

 they are now ; what he did maintain is the very 

 different proposition that there is no good evidence 

 of anything of the kind. And that proposition 

 has not yet been shown to be incorrect. 



I owe more than I can tell to the careful study 

 of the " Principles of Geology " in my young 

 days ; and, long before the year 1856, my mind 

 was familiar with the truth that " the doctrine of 

 uniformity is not incompatible with great and 

 sudden changes," which, as I have shown, is 

 taught totidem verlis in that work. Even had it 

 been possible for me to shut my eyes to the sense 

 of what I had read in the " Principles," Whewell's 

 " Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," published 

 in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably 

 familiar, must have opened them. For the 

 always acute, if not always profound, author, in 

 arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, ex- 

 less degree by Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time 

 recorded by the stratified rocks. I said : " This attempt to 

 limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and de- 

 ductive reasoning from the things which are to the things which 

 were this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have 

 cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geo- 

 logical speculation which it might otherwise have held " (Lay 

 Sermons, p. 260). The context shows that " uniibrmitarianism " 

 here means that doctrine, as limited in application by Hutton 

 and Lyell, and that what I mean by "evolutionism" is con- 

 sistent and thoroughgoing uniformitarianism. 



