ADDRESS. 1 3 



saw that many saccessive renovations and destrnctions had been effected 

 on the earth's surface, and that this long line of vicissitudes formed a 

 series of which the earliest were lost in antiquity, while the latest were 

 still in progress towards an apparently illimitable future. 



The discoveries of William Smith, had they been adequately under- 

 stood, would have been seen to offer a corrective to this rigidly uniformi- 

 tarian conception, for they revealed that the crust of the earth contains 

 the long record of an unmistakable order of progression in organic types. 

 They proved that plants and animals have varied widely in successive 

 periods of the earth's history, the present condition of organic life being 

 only the latest phase of a long preceding series, each stage of which re- 

 cedes further from the existing aspect of things as we trace it backward 

 into the past. And though no relic had yet been found, or indeed was 

 ever likely to be found, of the first living things that appeared upon the 

 earth's surface, the manifest simplification of types in the older formations 

 pointed irresistibly to some beginning from which the long procession 

 had taken its start. If then it could thus be demonstrated that there 

 had been upon the globe an orderly march of living forms from the low- 

 liest grades in early times to man himself to-day, and thus that in one 

 department of her domain, extending through the greater portion of the 

 records of the earth's history. Nature had not been uniform but had 

 followed a vast and noble plan of evolution, surely it might have been 

 expected that those who discovered and made known this plan would 

 seek to ascertain whether some analogous physical progression from a 

 definite beginning might not be discernible in the framework of the globe 



itself. 



But the early masters of the science laboured under two great disad- 

 vantages. In the first place, they found the oldest records of the earth's 

 history so broken up and effaced as to be no longer legible. And in the 

 second place, they lived under the spell of that strong reaction against 

 speculation which followed the bitter controversy between the Neptunists 

 and Plutonists in the earlier decades of the century. They considered 

 themselves bound to search for facts, not to build up theories ; and as in 

 the crust of the earth they could find no facts which threw any light 

 upon the primeval constitution and subsequent development of our planet, 

 they shut their ears to any theoretical interpretations that might be 

 offered from other departments of science. It was enough for them to main- 

 tain, as Hutton had done, that in the visible structure of the earth itself 

 no trace can be found of the beginning of things, and that the oldest ter- 

 restrial records reveal no physical conditions essentially different from 



