178 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



Lyellian doctrine of metamorphism. Hutton, having de- 

 monstrated that granite is not an aqueous but an igneous 

 rock, further showed that the " Alpine schistus," that is, 

 the series of crystalline schists, being stratified, could not 

 be original or primitive, but must have been deposited in 

 successive layers like more recent sediments, and were 

 invaded and altered by the granite. Let me quote a 

 passage from his chapter "On the Primary Part of the 

 Present Earth" in illustration of the sagacity of his 

 judgment on this subject: "If, in examining our land, 

 we shall find a mass of matter which had been evidently 

 formed originally in the ordinary manner of stratification, 

 but which is now extremely distorted in its structure and 

 displaced in its position, which is also extremely con- 

 solidated in its mass and variously changed in its com- 

 position, which, therefore, has the marks of its original 

 or marine composition extremely obliterated, and many 

 subsequent veins of melted mineral matter interjected, 

 we should then have reason to suppose that here were 

 masses of matter which, though not different in their origin 

 from those that are gradually deposited at the bottom of 

 the ocean, have been more acted upon by subterranean 

 heat and the expanding power, that is to say, have been 

 changed in a greater degree by the operations of the 

 mineral kingdom." 1 Hutton here compresses into a 

 single, though somewhat cumbrous, sentence the doctrine 

 to which Lyell in later years gave the name of meta- 

 morphism. 



Button's vision not only reached far back into the 

 geological past, it stretched into the illimitable future, 



1 Theory of the Earth, vol. i. pp. 375, 376. 



