90 THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE 



seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ; 

 the speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Pro- 

 togsea ' and of Buff on in his ' Theorie de 

 la Terre ; ' the sober and profound reason- 

 ings of Hutton, in the latter part of the 

 eighteenth century ; all these tended to 

 show that the fabric of the earth itself 

 implied the continuance of processes of 

 natural causation for a period of time as 

 great, in relation to human history, as the 

 distances of the heavenly bodies from us 

 are, in relation to terrestrial standards of 

 measurement. The abyss of time began 

 to loom as large as the abyss of space. 

 And this revelation to sight and touch, of 

 a link here and a link there of a practi- 

 cally infinite chain of natural causes and 

 effects, prepared the way, as perhaps 

 nothing else has done, for the modern 

 form of the ancient theory of evolution. 

 In the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century, De Maillet made the first seri- 

 ous attempt to apply the doctrine to the 



