TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 711 



Section C- GEOLOGY. 

 President or thb Seoxiox— Professor AV, J. Sollas, D.Sc, LL.D., F.U.S. 



THVItSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6. 

 The President delivered the following Address :— 



Evolutional Geology. 



The close of one century, the dawn of another, may naturally suggest some hrief 

 retrospective glance over the path along which our science has advanced, and some 

 general survey of its present position from which we may gather hope of its 

 future progress ; but other connection with geology the beginnings and end- 

 ings of centuries have none. The great periods of movement have hitherto begun, 

 as it were, in the early twilight hours, long before the dawn. Thus the iirst step 

 forward, since which there has been no retreat, was taken by Steno in the year 

 1669 ; more than a century elapsed before James Hutton (17S5) gave fresh energy 

 and better direction to the faltering steps of the young science ; while it was less 

 than a century later (18G-3) when Lord Kelvin brought to its aid the powers of the 

 higher mathematics and instructed it in the teachings of modern physics. From 

 Steno onward tbe spirit of geology was catastrophic ; from Hutton onward it 

 grew increasingly uniformitarian ; from the time of Darwin and Kelvin it has 

 become evolutional. The ambiguity of the word ' uniformitarian ' has led to a 

 good deal of fruitless logomachy, against which it may be as well at once to guard 

 by indicatino- the sense in which it is used here In one way we are all uniformi- 

 tarians, z.e., we accept the doctrine of the ' uniform action of natural causes,' but, 

 as applied to geology, uniformity means more than this. Defined in the briefest 

 fashion it is the geology of Lyell. Plutton had given us a ' Theory of the Earth,' 

 in its main outlines still faithful and true ; and this Lyell spent his life in illustrating 

 and advocating ; but as so commonly happens the zeal of the disciple outran the 

 wisdom of the master, and mere opinions were insisted on as necessary dogma. 

 AVhat did it matter if Hutton as a result of his inquiries into terrestrial history 

 had declared that he found no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end ? It 

 would have been marvellous if he had ! Consider that when Hutton's ' Theory ' 

 was published William Smith's famous discovery had not been made, and that 

 nothing was then known of the orderly succession of forms of life, which it is one 

 of the triumphs of geology to have revealed ; consider, too, the existing state of 

 physics at the time, and "that the modern theories of energy had still to be for- 

 mulated ; consider also that spectroscopy had not yet lent its aid to astronomy 

 and the consequent ignorance of the nature of nebulae ; and then, if you will, cast 

 a stone at Hutton. With Lyell, however, the case was different : in pressing his 

 uniformitarian creed upon geology he omitted to take into account the great 



