THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



similar floods for the extermination of previous popula- 

 tions. 



It is true these scientific citations had met with only 

 qualified approval at the time of their utterance, because 

 then the conservative majority of mankind did not con- 

 cede that there had been a plurality of populations or 

 revolutions; but now that the belief in past geologic 

 ages had ceased to be a heresy, the recurring catastro- 

 phes of the great paleontologists were accepted with 

 acclaim. For the moment science and tradition were at 

 one, and there was a truce to controversy, except indeed 

 in those outlying skirmish-lines of thought whither news 

 from headquarters does not permeate till it has become 

 ancient history at its source. 



The truce, however, was not for long. Hardly had 

 contemporary thought begun to adjust itself to the 

 conception of past ages of incomprehensible extent, 

 each terminated by a catastrophe of the Noachian 

 type, when a man appeared who made the utterly be- 

 wildering assertion that the geological record, instead 

 of proving numerous catastrophic revolutions in the 

 earth's past history, gives no warrant to the preten- 

 sions of any universal catastrophe whatever, near or 

 remote. 



This iconoclast was Charles Lyell, the Scotchman, who 

 was soon to be famous as the greatest geologist of his 

 time. As a voiing man he had become imbued with the 



- 



force of the Huttonian proposition, that present causes 

 are one with those that produced the past changes of 

 the globe, and he carried that idea to what he conceived 

 to be its logical conclusion. To his mind this excluded 



O 



the thought of catastrophic changes in either inorganic 



or organic worlds. 



99 



