BUTTON'S POSITION 203 



His predecessors and contemporaries were never tired 

 of invoking the more vigorous manifestations of terres- 

 trial energy. They saw in the composition of the land 

 and in the structure of mountains and valleys memorials 

 of numberless convulsions and cataclysms. In Hutton's 

 philosophy, however, * it is the little causes, long con- 

 tinued, which are considered as bringing about the 

 greatest changes of the earth/ 1 



And yet, unlike many of those who derived their 

 inspiration from his teaching, but pushed his tenets to 

 extremes which he doubtless never anticipated, he did 

 not look upon time as a kind of scientific fetich, the 

 invocation of which would endow with efficacy even 

 the most trifling phenomena. As if he had foreseen 

 the use that might be made of his doctrine, he uttered 

 this remarkable warning : ' With regard to the effect 

 of time, though the continuance of time may do 

 much in those operations which are extremely slow, 

 where no change, to our observation, had appeared 

 to take place, yet, where it is not in the nature of 

 things to produce the change in question, the un- 

 limited course of time would be no more effectual 

 than the moment by which we measure events in 

 our observations/ 2 



We thus see that in the philosophy of Hutton, out 

 of which so much of modern geology has been de- 

 veloped, the vastness of the antiquity of the globe was 

 deduced from the structure of the terrestrial crust and 

 the slow rate of action of the forces by which the sur- 

 face of the crust is observed to be modified. But no 



1 Theory of the Earth, vol. ii. p. 205. 



2 Op. fit., vol. i. p. 44. 



