514 SCIENCE. 
continents. When he stood face to face 
with the proofs of decay among the moun- 
tains, there seems to have arisen upper- 
most in his mind the thought of the im- 
mense succession of ages which these proofs 
revealed to him. His observant eye en- 
abled 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 appar- 
ently 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 in- 
ability 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 mem- 
orable 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 quantity of 
time which the ablution of so much wasted 
mountain might require.’ 
Far as Hutton could follow the succes- 
sion 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 penetrate. 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 be- 
yond the limits of his evidence. ‘‘I do not 
pretend,”’ he said, ‘to describe the begin- 
* Theory of the Earth, Vol. I., p. 108. 
T Op. cit., Vol. IL., p. 329. 
[N. 8S. Vou. X. No. 250. 
ning 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 de- 
tect a repeated series of similar revolutions, 
the oldest of which was assuredly not the 
first in the terrestrial history, and he con- 
cluded, as “the result of this physical in- 
quiry, that we find no vestige of a begin- 
ning, 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 contra- 
dicted by the principles of natural phi- 
losophy. 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 notwithstanding 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 specu- 
lations do not seem to me more philosoph- 
ical than many of those of the older cos- 
mogonists. 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 
* Op. cit., Vol. I., p. 173, note. 
Tt Op. cit., Vol. I., p. 200. 
