APPENDIX B . 83 



APPENDIX B. 



P. 5. The measure here named has greatly impeded free 

 inquiry on questions relating to geological chronology. The 

 subject is too long and too intricate for discussion here, but 

 I must demur to inquiry being stayed by a barrier based upon 

 a doctrine so questionable on physical grounds as that of Uni- 

 formity of action both in kind and degree in all past time. To 

 assume that the present slow movements of the crust of the 

 earth give the rate of movement for the long past seems to me to 

 involve a physical impossibility as great as that of a universal 

 deluge. The forces now acting upon the crust are in a state of 

 comparative equilibrium. But even now there are instances of 

 sudden elevatory movements of a few feet, as for example on the 

 west coast of South America of four or five feet, and more lately of 

 a fault of twenty feet formed in a single night in Japan. Which 

 of these three rates are we to adopt ? or rather is it possible to 

 accept any of them as a measure of geological time ? or if any, 

 it certainly should be the maximum. Are we to ignore the 

 major and accept a minor quantity 1 



If we could suppose that the causes which produced the move- 

 ments'^ of the earth's crust had always acted with the same degree 

 of energy, the reasoning of the TJiiif ormitarians would hold good ; 

 but as that regularity depends upon the stresses to which the 

 earth's crust has been exposed at any particular time, the effects 

 must have varied in proportion as the stresses varied. "With a 

 gradually cooling globe it could not have been otherwise. "What 

 those movements of the past were, and what their direction, must 

 be judged of by other circumstances and on surer data. 1 



1 I have discussed this question at some length in a paper " On the Posi- 

 tion of Geology," published in the Nineteenth Century Magazine for October, 

 1893, and re -published in my Collected Papers on Controverted Questions of 

 Geology > 1895. 



