300 GEOLOGIES AND DELUGES 



There is no insuperable difficulty in this explanation ; 

 its great merit lies in its accordance with the course 

 of Nature as we observe it at the present day ; and 

 henceforward it became the motto of geology that the 

 processes of the present furnish the key to the interpre- 

 tation of the past. The changes in which the life of 

 the earth is manifest are not only slow and gradual now, 

 but they have ever been the" same. The earthquakes, 

 which in ancient times shook the land, were supposed 

 to have been no more violent than those of which we 

 have lately read in the daily newspapers ; the ancient 

 volcanos not more terrible in their outbursts than 

 Krakatoa ; floods not more appalling than those which 

 still from time to time sweep away tens or even hundreds 

 of thousands of human beings from the Ganges Plain, 

 and the earth, instead of falling into convulsions every 

 now and then, was imagined to proceed on the even tenour 

 of her way, without haste and without rest, preserving 

 a uniformity in her progress which impresses us with 

 its solemn grandeur, but sometimes seems a trifle 

 monotonous. From its belief that an unbroken uni- 

 formity in the operations of Nature extends from the 

 present into the most remote past, geology now came 

 to be called " uniforrnitarian." It was no longer theo- 

 logic, no longer catastrophic, and, I am sorry to add, no 

 longer cosmologic. It persistently refused to inquire into 

 the early history of our planet, and restricting its study to 

 the accessible parts of the earth's crust, it abdicated its 

 regal position as the science of the earth, and became as 

 it were a mere petty chieftain, dealing only with rocks and 

 the fossils they contain; the fossils, by the way, not 

 rightly belonging to its province at all. Apart from this, 

 however, and in its self-limited career, geology pursued 

 a luminous advance, and as it did so the Noachian deluge 

 began to sink into an oblivion which it might be thought 



