130 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



opment. They have been the vital forces in the earth's evolu- 

 tion. 



The doctrine of uniformitarianism as a geological prin- 

 ciple started originally with the earth's crust already formed. 

 It did not concern the condition of the earth previous to the 

 formation of a crust. It was not concerned with astronomical 

 theories of the origin of the earth and other planets. It con- 

 cerned the evolution of the earth's crust since it began to 

 exist as such, or, more properly, since the time when its his- 

 torical development is recorded in facts still in existence, facts 

 that have not been erased during the waste of the ages. 



It was a doctrine of geology and not of cosmogony, 

 though it could have been applied to the hypothesis of Laplace, 

 but without geological significance. The doctrine was first 

 formulated by Hutton, a Scotch geologist, who did his work 

 in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The gist of his 

 doctrine was contained in the much quoted sentence that in 

 the contemplation of the earth he could see "no vestige of a 

 beginning, no prospect of an end"; that, as far back as direct 

 observation of the facts of earth existence could lead us, we 

 saw the same endless change that we observe going on around 

 us at present, and that in the existing facts we could see no 

 prospect of an end. Hutton announced his theory on the 

 basis of limited observation of facts. He traveled very little, 

 spending most of his life in his native town of Edinburgh. 

 After his death his doctrine received very little notice until 

 it was taken up by Charles Lyell, afterward Sir Charles Lyell, 

 and developed and illustrated by facts of observation gathered 

 far and wide over the then inhabited portion of Europe and 

 America. His results were published in his famous "Princi- 

 ples of Geology" in the third decade of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. 



The doctrine has been modified slightly since Lyell pub- 

 lished his book, but only to soften down some of its angular- 

 ities and to lop off some of its extremities. In very recent 



