TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 719 
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 conti- 
nents. When he stood face to face with the proofs of decay among the moun- 
tains, 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 operations, which the vulgar do not see, and which the 
learned seem to see without wonder.’! In contemplating the stupendous results 
achieved by such apparently 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 that will be disputed ; but after allowing all the parts, the whole will 
be denied ; and for what ?—only because we are not disposed to allow that quan- 
tity of time which the ablution of so much wasted mountain might require.’ ” 
Far as Hutton could follow the succession of events registered in the rocky 
crust of the globe, he found himself baffled by the closing in around him of that 
dark abysm of time into which neither eye nor imagination seemed able to pene- 
trate. He well knew that, behind and beyond the ages recorded in the oldest of 
the primitive rocks, there must have stretched a vast earlier time, of which no 
record met his view. He did not attempt to speculate beyond the limits of his 
evidence. ‘I donot pretend, he said, ‘to describe the beginning of things ; I 
take things such as I find them at present, and from these I reason with regard to 
that which must have been.’* In vain could he look, even among the oldest 
formations, for any sign of the infancy of the planet. He could only detect a 
repeated series of similar revolutions, the oldest of which was assuredly not the 
first in the terrestrial history, and he concluded, as ‘the result of this physical 
inquiry, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’ 
This conclusion from strictly geological evidence has been impugned from the 
side of physics, and, as further developed by Playfair, has been declared to be 
contradicted by the principles of natural philosophy. But if it be considered on 
the basis of the evidence on which it was originally propounded, it was absolutely 
true in Hutton’s time and remains true to-day. That able reasoner never claimed 
that the earth has existed from all eternity, or that it will go on existing for ever. 
He admitted that it must have had a beginning, but he had been unable to find 
any vestige of that beginning in the structure of the planet itself. And notwith- 
standing all the multiplied researches of the century that has passed since the 
immortal ‘Theory of the Earth’ was published, no relic of the first condition of 
our earth has been found. We have speculated much, indeed, on the subject, and 
our friends the physicists have speculated still more. Some of the speculations do 
not seem to me more philosophical than many of those of the older cosmogonists. 
As far as reliable evidence can be drawn from the rocks of the globe itself, we do 
not seem to be nearer the discovery of the beginning than Hutton was. The most 
ancient rocks that can be reached are demonstrably not the first-formed of all. 
They were preceded by others which we know must have existed, though no 
vestige of them may remain. 
It may be further asserted that, while it was Hutton who first impressed on 
modern geology the conviction that for the adequate comprehension of the past 
1 Theory of the Earth, vol. i. p. 108, 3 Op. cit. vol. i. p. 173, note. 
© Op. cit. vol. ii. p. 329. 4 Op. cit. vol. i. p. 200. 
