A. B. Runt — A Vindication of Bacon, Hiwley, and others. 271 



in certain other things — in the coherency and purpose in the world 

 and in the greatness of human destiny. Worlds may freeze and 

 suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can 

 never die again" ("The Discovery of the Future," T. G. Wells, 

 Nature, 1902, p. 531). 



If the Koyal Institution listens respectfully in the twentieth 

 century to the unsupported belief that man will survive his frozen 

 globe, and the British Association listened respectfully to Siemens' 

 speculations on such thermal maintenance as would avoid that cold 

 contingency, must Lyell be deemed as sinning against the light 

 if he did not despair of the detention of proofs of a self-sustaining 

 power, the position taken by Lyell being far less confident than 

 that of either Siemens or Wells ? 



It may be worth while to notice an admirable summary by 

 Phillips of the state of geological theory in 1839: "That the doctrine 

 of progressive cooling of our globe is to be now received as an 

 established theory, those who desire the real progress of geology 

 will prevent themselves from affirming; and perhaps few who have 

 attended to the inferences contained in these volumes will hesitate 



to believe that it will one day become so The figure of 



the earth, its density, the actual temperature of its surface and 

 interior parts, etc., are all capable of explanation by this one 

 consideration" (Phillips' Treatise on Geology, vol. ii, p. 277). 



The earliest teaching I received in geology, some time in the 

 fifties, was, that the figure of the earth, the oblate spheroid, proved 

 its original liquidity; and that catastrophe was "the forlorn hope 

 of an almost extinct body of philosophers." Lyell's Uniformitarian 

 theory was the protest against a series of creations and catastrophes. 

 Like a good cobbler he stuck to his last and left cosmogony to the 

 astronomers and physicists, who alone were competent to deal with 

 it, or at least were supposed so to be. But I must say I have my 

 doubts. Bacon's test for a sound theory is that it shall be able to 

 confirm its own extent and generality by giving surety in pointing 

 out new particulars. If the rule be sound it will prove itself in. 

 the example. Now Lord Kelvin's ' Age of the Earth ' breaks 

 down completely in his own hands when put to this test. He has 

 worked us an example of his own choosing, wherein, so to speak, 

 every figure is wrong. 



Based on his hypothesis of the mode of consolidation of the Earth 

 is Lord Kelvin's conjecture of the ' Probable Origin of Granite,' 

 e.g. : In the primeval lava there arises " a snow shower of solidified 

 lava or of crystallized flakes, or prisms, or granules of felspar, mica, 

 hornblende, quartz, and other ingredients. . . . This process 

 goes on until, by the heaping of granules and crystals on the 

 bottom, our lava ocean becomes silted up to the surface . . . 

 at the stage now reached [we have] a red hot or white hot surface 

 of solid granules or crystals with interstices filled with the mother 

 liquor still liquid, but ready to freeze at the slightest cooling. 

 It was probably this interstitial mother liquor that was 

 destined to form the basaltic rock of future geological time" ("The 

 Age of the Earth," Trans. Vict. Inst., vol. xxxi, pp. 24, 25). 



