THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



this one seemed quite sufficient. Icebergs, said Lyell, 

 are observed to cany all manner of debris, and deposit 

 it in the sea-bottoms. Present land surfaces have often 

 been submerged beneath the sea. During the latest of 

 these submergences icebergs deposited the bowlders now 

 scattered here and there over the land. Nothing could 

 be simpler or more clearly uniformitarian. And even 

 the catastrophists, though they met Lyell amicably on 

 almost no other theoretical ground, were inclined to ad- 

 mit the plausibility of his theory of erratics. Indeed, of 

 all Ly ell's non-conformist doctrines, this seemed the one 

 most likely to meet with general acceptance. 



Yet, even as this iceberg theory loomed large and 

 larger before the geological world, observations were 

 making in a different field that were destined to sjiow 

 its fallacy. As early as 1815 a sharp-eyed chamois-hunt- 

 er of the Alps, Perraudin by name, had noted the ex- 

 istence of the erratics, and, unlike most of his companion 

 hunters, had puzzled his head as to how the bowlders 

 got where he saw them. He knew nothing of sub- 

 merged continents or of icebergs, still less of upheaving 

 mountains; and though he doubtless had heard of the 

 Flood, he had no experience of heavy rocks Hoating like 

 corks in water. Moreover, he had never observed stones 

 rolling up hill and perching themselves on mountain- 

 tops, and he was a good enough uniformitarian (though 

 he would have been puzzled indeed had any one told 

 him so) to disbelieve that stones in past times had dis- 

 ported themselves differently in this regard from stones 

 of the present. Yet there the stones are. How did they 

 get there? 



The mountaineer thought that he could answer that 

 question. He saw about him those gigantic serpent-like 



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