410 SIR CHARLES LYELL 



lands added to various deltas, or devoured by the set, to 

 gether with the effects of devastation by floods, and imagine 

 that all these events had happened in one year, we must 

 form most exalted ideas of the activity of the agents, and 

 the suddenness of the revolutions. If geologists, therefore, 

 have misinterpreted the signs of a succession of events, so as 

 to conclude that centuries were implied where the characters 

 indicated thousands of years, and thousands of years where 

 Ihe language of Nature signified millions, they could not, if 

 tiiey reasoned logically from such false premises, come to 

 any other conclusion than that the system of the natural 

 world had undergone a complete revolution. 



We should be warranted in ascribing the erection of the 

 great pyramid to superhuman power, if we were convinced 

 that it was raised in one day ; and if we imagine, in the same 

 manner, a continent or mountain-chain to have been elevated 

 during an equally small fraction of the time which was 

 really occupied in upheaving it, we might then be justified 

 in inferring, that the subterranean movements were once far 

 more energetic than in our own times. We know that dur- 

 ing one earthquake the coast of Chili may be raised for a 

 hundred miles to the average height of about three feet A 

 repetition of two thousand shocks, of equal violence, might 

 produce a mountain-chain one hundred miles long, and six 

 thousand feet high. Now, should one or two only of these 

 convulsions happen in a century, it would be consistent with 

 the order of events experienced by the Chilians from the 

 earliest times: but if the whole of them were to occur in the 

 next hundred years, the entire district must be depopulated, 

 scarcely any animals or plants could survive, and the sur- 

 face would be one confused heap of ruin and desolation. 



One consequence of undervaluing greatly the quantity of 

 past time, is the apparent coincidence which it occasions of 

 events necessarily disconnected, or which are so unusual, 

 that it would be inconsistent with all calculation of chances 

 to suppose them to happen at one and the same time. When 

 the unlooked-for association of such rare phenomena is 

 witnessed in the present course of nature, it scarcely ever 

 fails to excite a suspicion of the preternatural in those minds 

 which are not firmly convinced of the uniform agency of 







