4H HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 



pose that such marks should anywhere exist. The Author of Nature 

 has not given to the universe laws which carry in themselves the ele- 

 ments of their own destruction, like the institutions of men. He has 

 not permitted in His works any symptom of infancy or of old age, or 

 any sign by which we may estimate either their future or their past 

 duration. He may put an end, as He no doubt gave a beginning, to 

 the present system at some determinate period of time ; but we may 

 rest assured that this great catastrophe will not be brought about by 

 the laws now existing, and that it is not indicated by anything which 

 we perceive." Hutton and other geologists were for many years sub- 

 jected to the charge of wilful perversion or blind misconception of the 

 facts of nature, in the supposed interests of infidelity and atheism. 

 The persons who made these charges imagined that all true religion 

 was bound up with the acceptance of the Mosaic cosmogony in the 

 precise sense in which they themselves had been accustomed to accept 

 it. There can be no doubt that the progress of geological science in 

 the eighteenth and in the earlier part of the nineteenth century was 

 greatly impeded by the prejudices entertained by those who believed 

 that the Bible was intended to teach physical science. 



It would be unnecessary to describe here the reproaches and de- 

 nunciations Vhich were hurled at the unfortunate geologists. After a 

 time we find some of the most eminent cultivators of geology among 

 English beneficed clergymen, of whom Dean Conybeare and Dean 

 Buckland may be named as examples ; and we find also that so far 

 from the Mosaic record being, as formerly supposed, inconsistent with 

 geological theories, a score of different writers have published books 

 in which geology and Genesis are reconciled in as many different ways. 

 After a time we find also that the age of the earth, a point on which 

 much angry disputation was raised, had come to be generally acknow- 

 ledged as indisputably greater than the cosmically insignificant period 

 of six thousand years ; and at the present day the great antiquity of 

 our planet may be considered as generally accepted by all who would 

 admit the kindred doctrine of its revolution round the sun. 



The theories of the earth advanced by Hutton and Werner respec- 

 tively divided geologists themselves into two opposed camps, and a 

 great and memorable contention arose as to whether fire or water was 

 the principal agent in producing the actual condition of the earth. 



As a matter of fact both these agents are still at work, modifying the 

 condition of the earth. In the eruption of volcanoes (See Plate X.) the 

 changes produced by igneous agency are too obvious to be overlooked. 

 The action of water is in general slow and imperceptible, but it is 

 constant. For example, a spring quietly issuing from a mountain's side, 

 and flowing gently downwards with crystal clearness (See Plate XL), 

 would appear anything but a destructive agent ; and yet the water may 

 have silently removed vast quantities of limestone, and hollowed huge 

 caverns within the mountain. 



