Notices of Memoirs — Prof. Solks's Address to Section C. 449 



II. — British Asbooiation for the Advancement of Soibnok. 

 Bradford, 1900. 



Address to the Geological Section, by Professor W. J. Sollas^ 

 D.Sc, LL.D., F.E.S., President of the Section. (Slightly abridged.) 



Evolutional Geology. 



THE close of one century, the dawn of another, may naturally 

 suggest some brief retrospective glance over the path along 

 which our science has advanced, and some general survey of its 

 present position from which we may gather hope of its future 

 progress ; but other connection with geology the beginnings and 

 endings of centuries have none. The great periods of movement 

 have hitherto begun, as it were, in the early twilight hours, long 

 before the dawn. Thus the first step forward, since which there 

 has been no retreat, was taken by Steno in the year 1669 ; more 

 than a century elapsed before James Huttou (1785) gave fresh 

 energy and better direction to the faltering steps of the young 

 science ; while it was less than a century later (1863) when Lord 

 Kelvin brought to its aid the powers of the higher mathematics and 

 instructed it in the teachings of modern physics. From Steno 

 onward the spirit of geology was catastrophic ; from Hutton onward 

 it grew increasingly uniformitarian ; from the time of Darwin and 

 Kelvin it has become evolutional. The ambiguity of the word 

 ' uniformitarian ' has led to a good deal of fruitless logomachy, 

 against which it may be as well at once to guard by indicating the 

 sense in which it is used here. In one way we are all uniformi- 

 tarians, i.e. we accept the doctrine of the " uniform action of natural 

 causes," but, as applied to geology, uniformity means more than 

 this. Defined in the briefest fashion it is the geology of Lyell. 

 Hutton had given us a " Theory of the Earth," in its main outlines 

 still faithful and true, and this Lyell spent his life in illustrating 

 and advocating ; but, as so commonly happens, the zeal of the 

 disciple outran the wisdom of the master, and mere opinions were 

 insisted on as necessary dogma. What did it matter if Hutton, as 

 a result of his inquiries into terrestrial history, had declared that he 

 found no vestige of a beginning, no jDrospect of an end ? It would 

 have been marvellous if he had ! Consider that when Hutton's 

 " Theory " was published William Smith's famous discovery had 

 not been made, and that nothing was then known of the orderly 

 succession of forms of life, which it is one of the triumphs of geology 

 to have revealed ; consider, too, the existing state of physics at the 

 time, and that the modern theories of energy had still to be formu- 

 lated ; consider also that spectroscopy had not yet lent its aid to 

 astronomy, and the consequent ignorance of the nature of nebulee ; 



and then, if you will, cast a stone at Hutton 



Our science has become evolutional, and in the transformation 

 has grown more comprehensive : her petty parochial days are done, 

 she is drawing her provinces closer around her, and is fusing them 

 together into a united and single commonwealth — the science of 

 the earth. 



DECADE IV. VOL. Vn. NO. I. 29 



