SCIENCE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY 



Some speculators, holding that the interior of the globe 

 is a great abyss of waters, conceived that' the crust had 

 dropped into this chasm and had thus been inundated. 

 Others held that the earth had originally revolved on 

 a vertical axis, and that the sudden change to its pres- 

 ent position had caused the catastrophic shifting of 

 its oceans. But perhaps the favorite theory was that 

 which supposed a comet to have wandered near the 

 earth, and in whirling about it to have carried the wa- 

 ters, through gravitation, in a vast tide over the conti- 

 nents. 



Thus blindly groped the majority of eighteenth-cen- 

 tury philosophers in their attempts to study what we 

 now term geology. Deluded by the old deductive 

 methods, they founded not a science, but the ghost of a 

 science, as immaterial and as unlike anything in nature 

 as any other phantom that could be conjured from the 

 depths of the speculative imagination. And all the while 

 the beckoning earth lay beneath the feet of these vision- 

 aries ; but their eyes were fixed in air. 



At last, however, there came a man who had the 

 penetration to see that the phantom science of geology 

 needed before all else a body corporeal, and who took to 

 himself the task of supplying it. This was Dr. James 

 Hutton, of Edinburgh, physician, farmer, and manufact- 

 uring chemist; patient, enthusiastic, level-headed devotee 

 of science. Inspired by his love of chemistry to study 

 the character of rocks and soils, Hutton had not gone far 

 before the earth stood revealed to him in a new light. 

 He saw, what generations of predecessors had blindly 

 refused to see, that the face of nature everywhere, 

 instead of being rigid and immutable, is perennially 

 plastic, and year by year is undergoing metamorphic 



19 



