NEWTON AND DARWIN. 1 1 



in that instead of ranging visibly throughout infini- 

 tudes of space, it dealt only with the families of living 

 creatures inhabiting this earth, but grander in relation 

 to time (or rather in its more obvious relation to 

 time), in that it required us to believe in processes of 

 development operating throughout tens and hundreds 

 of thousands nay, throughout millions of years. 

 Men were not prepared to extend on a sudden their 

 conceptions of time in the same degree, or in anything 

 like the same degree, that they had perforce extended 

 their conceptions of space. The more profound, 

 indeed, had already seen that this was only a logical 

 consequence of the widening of our ideas of space, 

 that the vastness of God's domain involved its corre- 

 spondingly extended duration. But Darwin was the 

 first to give definite tangible evidence of the practi- 

 cally infinite extension of time during which the pro- 

 cesses going on all around us have gone on in the 

 past, and (presumably) will go on in the future. The 

 universe, as Newton presented it, might have been 

 framed in a second by an Almighty Being, to last an 

 hour, or a year, or a century, and then to be replaced 

 by some new order of things ; though everything in 

 it, even as thus presented, suggests that in duration, 

 as in extent, it was, and is, and will be infinite to our 

 conceptions. But Darwin showed the traces of long- 

 past eeons, of long-past aeons of aeons, traces affording 

 evidence as clear to the eye of science as is the evi- 

 dence of the vastness of space afforded by the faint 

 rays of telescopic stars. 



