A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



of granite broadcast over the land. And they invoked 

 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, be- 

 cause then the conservative majority of mankind did 

 not concede that there had been a plurality of popula- 

 tions or revolutions; but now that the belief in past 

 geologic ages had ceased to be a heresy, the recurring 

 catastrophes of the great paleontologists were accepted 

 with acclaim. For the moment science and tradition 

 were at one, and there was a truce to controversy, ex- 

 cept 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 young 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 



86 



