454 Notices of Memoirs — British Association — 



achieved by such apparently feeble forces, Hutton felt that one great 

 ol>iection 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 

 ot 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 quantity of time which the 

 al)lution of ao njuch wasted mountain might require."' 



Far as Hutton could follow the succession of events registered in 

 the rocky crust of the globe, he found himself baflSed 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 beyond the 

 limits of his evidence. "I do not pretend," he said, "to descrilie 

 the beginning of things ; T 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 

 inipugned 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 

 S[ieculated 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 di'awn 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 



» "Theory of the Earth," vol. ii, p. 329. 

 ^ Op. cit., vol i, p. 173, note. 

 3 Op. cit., vol. i, p. 200. 



