200 GEOLOGICAL TIME 



the science. Among these pioneers none has left his 

 mark more deeply graven on the foundations of 

 modern geology than James Hutton. To him, more 

 than to any other writer of his day, do we owe the 

 doctrine of the high antiquity of our globe. No one 

 before him had ever seen so clearly the abundant and 

 impressive proofs of this remote antiquity recorded in 

 the rocks of the earth's crust. In these rocks he 

 traced the operation of the same slow and quiet 

 processes which he observed to be at work at present 

 in gradually transforming the face of the existing 

 continents. When he stood face to face with the 

 proofs of decay among the mountains, there seems to 

 have arisen uppermost in his mind the thought of the 

 immense succession of ages which these proofs revealed 

 to him. His observant eye enabled him to see ' the 

 operations of the surface wasting the solid body of 

 the globe, and to read the unmeasurable course of time 

 that must have flowed during those amazing opera- 

 tions, which the vulgar do not see, and which the 

 learned seem to see without wonder.' l In contem- 

 plating the stupendous results achieved by such appar- 

 ently feeble forces, Hutton felt that one great objection 

 he had to contend with in the reception of his theory, 

 even by the scientific men of his day, lay in the 

 inability or unwillingness of the human mind to admit 

 such large demands as he made on the past. 'What 

 more can we require ? ' he asks in summing up his 

 conclusions ; and he answers the question in these 

 memorable words : ' What more can we require ? 

 Nothing but time. It is not any part of the process 



1 Theory of the Earth, vol. i. p. 108. 



