X GEOLOGICAL REFORM 325 



hammer might he 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 uniformitarian 

 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, hmitations of the other. Nor is 

 the value of the doctrine of Evolution to the philo- 

 sophic thinker diminished by the fact that it applies 

 the same method to the hving 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 cub- 

 hood of its youth, through innumerable changes 

 and immeasurable ages, to its present form ; and 

 the development of a living being from the shape- 

 less 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 geology ; but, more 



