A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



light of later knowledge, neither friend nor foe deigned 

 to notice it at the moment. It was not published in 

 book form until the last decade of the century, when 

 Hutton had lived with and worked over his theory for 

 almost fifty years. Then it caught the eye of the 

 world. A school of followers expounded the Hutto- 

 nian doctrines ; a rival school under Werner in Germany 

 opposed some details of the hypothesis, and the edu- 

 cated world as a whole viewed the disputants askance. 

 The very novelty of the new views forbade their im- 

 mediate acceptance. Bitter attacks were made upon 

 the "heresies," and that was meant to be a soberly 

 tempered judgment which in 1800 pronounced Hutton's 

 theories " not only hostile to sacred history, but equally 

 hostile to the principles of probability, to the results 

 of the ablest observations on the mineral kingdom, 

 and to the dictates of rational philosophy." And all 

 this because Hutton's theory presupposed the earth 

 to have been in existence more than six thousand 

 years. 



Thus it appears that though the thoughts of men had 

 widened, in those closing days of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, to include the stars, they had not as yet expand- 

 ed to receive the most patent records that are written 

 everywhere on the surface of the earth. Before Hut- 

 ton's views could be accepted, his pivotal conception 

 that time is long must be established by convincing 

 proofs. The evidence was being gathered by William 

 Smith, Cuvier, and other devotees of the budding 

 science of paleontology in the last days of the century, 

 but their labors were not brought to completion till a 

 subsequent epoch. 



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