vn HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE 283 



With respect to such inundations as are the 

 consequences of earthquakes, and other slight 

 movements of the crust of the earth, I have 

 never heard of anything to show that they were 

 more frequent and severer in the quaternary or 

 tertiary epochs than they are now. In the 

 discussion of these, as of all other geological 

 problems, the appeal to needless catastrophes is 

 born of that impatience of the slow and painful 

 search after sufficient causes, in the ordinary 

 course of nature, which is a temptation to 

 all, though only energetic ignorance nowadays 

 completely succumbs to it. 



POSTSCRIPT. 



My best thanks are due to Mr. Gladstone for his courteous 

 withdrawal of one of the statements to which I have thought it 

 needful to take exception. The familiarity with controversy, 

 to which Mr. Gladstone alludes, will have accustomed him to 

 the misadventures which arise when, as sometimes will happen 

 in the heat of fence, the buttons come off the foils. I trust that 

 any scratch which he may have received will heal as quickly as 

 my own flesh wounds have done. 



A contribution to the last number of this Review ( The Nine- 

 teenth Century] of a different order would be left unnoticed, were 

 it not that my silence would convert me into an accessory to 

 misrepresentations of a very grave character. However, I shall 

 restrict myself to the barest possible statement of facts, leaving 

 my readers to draw their own conclusions. 



In an article entitled "A Great Lesson," published in this 

 Review for September, 1887 : 



(1) The Duke of Argyll says the "overthrow of Darwin's 

 speculations " (p. 301) concerning the origin of coral reefs, which 



