696 KEPOET— 1892. 



a simple and apparently undignified mode of creation that there is no wonder 

 that, even down to the present day, there still exist some to whom this is a hard 

 saying, to be taken, if taken at all, in homoeopathic doses and with undisguised 

 reluctance. 



Hutton as regards his philosophy was, as we know, far in advance of his 

 time. With all the boldness of conviction he unflinchingly followed out his ideas 

 to their legitimate results. He claimed that as the stratified formations were com- 

 posed of similar materials — sands, clays, limestones, and muds — to those now 

 being laid down in the seas around our present coasts, they must, like them, have 

 been the products of the ordinary natural agencies — of rain, rivers, and sea waters, 

 internal heat and external cold — acting precisely as they act now. And, further, 

 that as these formations lie one below the other, in apparently endless downward 

 succession, and are all formed more or less of these fragmentary materials, so the 

 present order of natural phenomena must have existed for untold ages. Indeed, to 

 the continixance of this order, he frankly admits ' I see no trace of a beginning 

 or sign of an end.' 



The history of the slow acceptance of Hutton's doctrines, even among geologists, 

 is, of course, perfectly familiar to us all. William Smith reduced the disputed forma- 

 tions to order, and showed that not only was each composed of the ruins of a 

 vanished land, but that each contained in its fossils the proof that it was deposited 

 in a vanished sea inhabited by a special life creation. Cuvier followed, and proved 

 that the fossilised relics of these departed beings were such as made it absolutely 

 unquestionable that these creatures might well have inhabited the earth at the 

 present day. Lyell completed the cycle by demonstrating stage by stage the 

 efficiency of present natural agencies to do all the work required for the degrada- 

 tion and rebuilding of the formations. Since his day the students of strati- 

 graphical geology have universally acknowledged that in the study of present 

 geographical causes lies the key to the geological formations and to the inorganic 

 world of the past. 



In this way the road was paved for Darwin and the doctrine of descent. The 

 aid which had been so ungrudgingly afforded by biology to geology was repaid by 

 one of the noblest gifts ever made by one science to another. For the purposes 

 of geology, the science of biology had practically completed a double demonstra- 

 tion : first, that the extinct life discernible in the geological formations was linked 

 inseparably with the organic life of the present ; and, second, that every fossil 

 recognised by the geologist was the relic of a creature that might well have existed 

 upon the surface of the earth at the present time. Geology repaid its obligation 

 to biology by the still greater twofold demonstration : first, that in the economy 

 of nature the most insignificant causes are competent to the grandest effects, if only 

 a sufficiency of time be granted them ; and, second, that in the geological forma- 

 tions we have the evidences of the actual existence of those mighty eons in which 

 such work might be done. 



The doctrine of organic evolution would always have remained a metaphysical 

 dream had geology not given the time in which the evolution could be accom- 

 plished. The ability of present causes to bring about slow and cumulative changes 

 in the species is, to all intents and purposes, a biological application of Hutton's 

 ideas with respect to the origin of the geological formations. Darwin was a bio- 

 logical evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is 

 pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, 

 gave it the means. 



But the inevitable consequence of the work of Darwin and his colleagues was 

 that the centre of gravity, so to speak, of popular regard and public controversy,, 

 was suddenly shifted from stratigraphical geology to biology. Since that day 

 stratigraphical geology, to its great comfort and advantage, has gone quietly on its 

 way unchallenged, and all its more recent results have, at least by the majority of 

 the wonder-loving public, been practically ignored. 



Indeed, to the outside observer it would seem as if stratigraphical geology for 

 the last thirty years had been practically at a standstill. The startling discoveries 

 and speculations of the brilliant stratigraphists of the end of the last century and. 



