Revieivs — Prof. Huxley's Presidential Address. 275 



I. — PnoFESsoR Huxley's Anniversary Address to the 

 Geological Society.^ 



ANY praise of this admirable address is superfluous. Its terse 

 nervous English, its fertility and readiness of illustration, its 

 wit, if such a thing is admissable into a scientific essay, and its 

 straightforward and logical pleading are beyond praise, and geo- 

 logists may well congratulate themselves on having met with such 

 an advocate. "We propose therefore to discuss the one point on 

 which we cannot quite agree with the author. The main aim and 

 object of the paper is to defend British geologists against a charge 

 brought against them by Sir W. Thomson of being in " direct 

 opposition to the principles of Natural Philosophy." The poiat on 

 which issue is joined is that of time. Sir William asserting, from 

 a study of the constitution of the sun, and other cosmical questions, 

 "that the existing state of things on the earth must be limited within 

 some such period of time as 100 millions of years ; " while, as is well 

 known, most geologists have hitherto been accustomed to hold in a 

 vague way that they have proof that the lifetime of our planet has 

 been far longer. 



Before coming, however, to the defence proper, the author gives 

 a sketch of the present state of geological thought, dividing 

 geologists into three schools, the Catastrophists, the Uniformitarians, 

 and the Evolutionists. The first two, whose names we are already 

 familiar with, though they differ radically on almost every other 

 point of importance, agree in setting certain limits to legitimate 

 geological speculation. The Evolutionists, who, though they were 

 to be found after a fashion among the earliest cultivators of the 

 science, now receive perhaps for the first time a name, know of 

 no bounds to their speculations, and fearlessly let their thoughts 

 wander back to the birthtime and earliest infancy of our planet, 

 and do not shrink from conjecturing what will be its future history. 

 While paying all due honour to Hutton, the founder, and Sir C. 

 Lyell, the modern expounder of the doctrines of the Uniformitarian 

 school, Prof Huxley blames them both because they have attempted 

 to limit geological speculation to those periods of which records 

 remain in the rocks of the earth, and have declared that their science 

 has nothing to do^ with those dark and far distant ages of which no 

 records have survived, when this planet may have existed as a 

 nebulous mass or a fiery ball of molten matter. We think they are 

 right. We can conceive a science which has for its object the 

 collection and deciphering of the evidence contained in those stony 

 documents in which a portion of the earth's history is darkly 

 written ; and we can conceive another science, which shall call to its 

 aid a strong imagination, checked by such analogy as is applicable to 

 the case, and shall frame theories as to what may not unreasonably 



* Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. Loud. 1869. Vol. xxy. Part 2, pp. xxviii.-liii. 



