102 SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE m 



pressly points out that it does not in any way 

 contravene the occurrence of catastrophes. 



With regard to such occurrences [earthquakes, deluges, etc.], 

 terrible as thoy appear at the time, they may not much affect 

 the average rate of change : there may be a cycle, though an 

 irregular one, of rapid and slow change : and if such cycles go 

 on succeeding each other, we may still call the order of nature 

 uniform, notwithstanding the periods of violence which it in- 

 volves. x 



The reader who has followed me through this 

 brief chapter of the history of geological philoso- 

 phy will probably find the following passage in 

 the paper of the Duke of Argyll to be not a little 

 remarkable : 



Many years ago, when I had the honour of being President of 

 the British Association,' 2 1 ventured to point out, in the presence 

 and in the hearing of that most distinguished man [Sir C. Lyell] 

 that the doctrine of uniformity was not incompatible with great 

 and sudden changes, since cycles of these and other cycles of 

 comparative rest might well be constituent parts of that uni- 

 formity which he asserted. Lyell did not object to this extended 

 interpretation of his own doctrine, and indeed expressed to me 

 his entire concurrence. 



I should think he did ; for, as I have shown, 

 there was nothing in it that Lyell himself had not 

 said, six-and-twenty years before, and enforced, 

 three years before ; and it is almost verbally 

 identical with the view of uniformitarianism 

 taken by Whewell, sixteen years before, in a work 

 with which, one would think, that any one who 



1 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i. p. 670. New 

 edition, 1847. 2 At Glasgow in 1856. 



