ON GEOLOGICAL TIME. 



which professedly neglects frictional resistance of 

 every kind ; and the statement that the phenomena 

 presented by the earth's crust contain no evidence 

 of a beginning, and no indication of progress 

 towards an end, is founded, I think, upon what is 

 very clearly a complete misinterpretation of the 

 physical laws under which all are agreed that 

 these actions take place. 



2. I shall endeavour to arrange what I have to 

 say in two divisions, taking the quotation from 

 Playfair, as it were, as the text : First, The 

 motions of the heavenly bodies ; the earth as one 

 of them : and, Secondly, The phenomena presented 

 by the earth's crust. 



3. Now, in the first place, the motions of the 

 heavenly bodies are subject to resistance, which 

 was not taken into account in the investigations of 

 the French mathematicians. They gave out the 

 theorem, that so far as the mutual attractions 

 between the sun and the planets, and the law of 

 inertia affecting the motions of each body, without 

 any opposition of resistance, are concerned, certain 

 disturbances known to exist among the motions 



