A. R. Hunt — A Vindication of Bacon, Huxley, anil otJters. 269' 



of development, or at least of the successive appearance on the earth 

 of beings more and more highly organized . . . . " (Elements, 

 1865, p. 586). And again, •' It may or may not be true .... 

 that the whole planet was once in a state of liquefaction by heat " 

 (loc. cit., p. 90). 



There is neither eternity nor uniformity in these passages, petro- 

 logical or palasontological. It seemed to me such a serious thing 

 that such baseless charges against our most illustrious geologists 

 should not only be brought before a scientific institution, but be sold, 

 at a cheap rate to the public, that I sent in my resignation as an 

 associate of the Victoria Institute. 



For my own instruction I sought to discuss Lord Kelvin's address 

 with a distinguished geologist and teacher, but he refused either to 

 read the address, to permit me to read extracts, or to discuss it in 

 any way, on the ground that Lord Kelvin was not a geologist, and 

 that it would be an absolute waste of time to discuss his opinions 

 on geology. I then applied to another distinguished man whom 

 Lord Kelvin had criticized, but he had not even taken the trouble 

 to ascertain what had been said of him. In fact, I was not only 

 driven from the geological judgment-seat, but bantered for taking 

 the matter so seriously. 



Under these circumstances I attended the Meeting of the British 

 Association at Bradford. To my unbounded consternation I heard 

 my friend Professor Sollas, President of Section C, in the opening 

 passages of his address repeat Lord Kelvin's charge against Lyell, 

 w^ith the addition of a serious reflection on the latter's honesty. 

 After excusing Hutton's ignorance the distinguished President went 

 on to say: "With Lyell, however, the case was different: in pressing 

 his uniformitarian creed on geology he omitted to take into account 

 the great advances made by its sister sciences, although he had 

 knowledge of them, and thus sinned against the light. In the last 

 edition of the famous ' Principles ' we read : ' It is a favourite dogma 

 of some physicists that not only the earth but the sun itself is 

 continually losing a portion of its heat, and that as thei-e is no 

 known source by which it can be restored we can foresee the time 

 when all life will cease to exist on this planet, and on the other 

 hand we can look back to a period when the heat was so intense 

 as to be incompatible with the existence of any organic beings 

 such as are known to us in the living or fossil world . . . . 

 a geologist in search of some renovating power by which the amount 

 of heat may be made to continue unimpaired for millions of years, 

 past and future, in the solid parts of the earth .... has 

 been compared by an eminent physicist to one who dreams he can 

 discover a clock with a source of perpetual motion and invent 

 a self-winding apparatus. But why should we despair of detecting 

 proofs of such regenerating and self-sustaining power in the works 

 of a Divine Artificer ? ' Here we catch the true spirit of uniformity ; 

 it admittedly regards the universe as a self-winding clock, and 

 barely conceals a conviction that the clock was warranted to keep 

 true Greenwich time " (Sollas, Kep. Brit. Assoc. Bradford, p. 712). 



