236 SPECULATIVE SCIENCE 





with. This view of past time is, we believe, wholly erroneous. 

 So far as this world is concerned, past ages are far from count- 

 less ; the ages to come are numbered ; no one age has resembled 

 its predecessor, nor will any future time repeat the past. The 

 estimates of geologists must yield before more accurate methods 

 of computation, and these show that our world cannot have been 

 habitable for more than an infinitely insufficient period for the 

 execution of the Darwinian transmutation. 



Before the grounds of these assertions are explained, let 

 us shortly consider the geological evidence. It is clear that 

 denudation and deposition of vast masses of matter have oc- 

 curred while the globe was habitable. The present rate of deposit 

 and denudation is very imperfectly known, but it is nevertheless 

 sufficiently considerable to account for all the effects we know 

 of, provided sufficient time be granted. Any estimate of the 

 time occupied in depositing or denuding a thousand feet of any 

 given formation, even on this hypothesis of constancy of action, 

 must be very vague. Darwin makes the denudation of the 

 Weald occupy 300,000,000 years, by supposing that a cliff 500 

 feet high was taken away one inch per century. Many people 

 will admit that a strong current washing the base of such a 

 cliff as this, might get on at least a hundredfold faster, perhaps 

 a thousandfold ; and on the other hand, we may admit that, for 

 aught geology can show, the denudation of the Weald may have 

 occupied a few million times more years than the number Darwin 

 arrives at. The whole calculation savours a good deal of that 

 known among engineers as c guess at the half and multiply by 

 two.' 



But again, what are the reasons for assuming uniformity of 

 action, for believing that currents were no stronger, storms no 

 more violent, alternations of temperature no more severe, in past 

 ages than at present ? These reasons, stated shortly, are that 

 the simple continuance of actions we are acquainted with 

 would produce all the known results, that we are not justi- 

 fied in assuming any alteration in the rate or violence of 

 those actions without direct evidence, that the presence of 

 fossils and the fineness of the ancient deposits show directly 

 that things of old went on much as now. This last reason, 

 apparently the strongest, is really the weakest; the deposits 



