558 Reports and Proceedings—Duke of Argyil’s Address. 
identity of the causes which produced them with the causes which 
produced other changes in the far vistas of the Paleozoic Age. It 
was a grand conception, which had taken entire possession of his 
mind, and in the light of which he saw and interpreted every fact. 
Nor was it more grand than true—for my own belief is that if it led, 
and does still lead, to some misinterpretations of geological phenomena, 
these misinterpretations arise, not from over-estimating, but from 
under-estimating the immense contents of that conception, and the 
vast variety of changes which it is large enough to cover. Lyell 
himself did much to show how great were the catastrophes—how 
violent and sudden were the destructive agencies of which man has 
had experience even in the historic ages. It was part of his argument 
to ransack every record he could find of great volcanic outbursts, of 
great areas of country covered with lava, or suddenly and considerably 
elevated above the sea. We have only to pursue this argument 
a little farther, and all may be reconciled. We must not stop when 
human records cease. We must include all the changes of which we 
haye any other record—any other proof, or even any other indication, 
We need not make any adverse assumption, however probable. We 
need not assume that as progress and development has been dis- 
covered to be the law and the history of organie beings, so have 
corresponding changes passed over the forces determining the con- 
ditions of the habitat of life. We need not assume, however reasonable 
the supposition may be, that the difference between man and ‘‘dragons 
of the prime, which tore each other in their slime,” is a difference 
which ran parallel with a corresponding difference in the restfulness 
of nature, and in the fittings of our planet. Nor is it necessary to go 
to other sciences than our own, and call in the help of such abstract 
conceptions as the ‘‘ Dissipation of Energy” to dispose us to believe 
that as we go back in time there may have been—probably there 
must have been—greater activity in the agencies of change. It is 
quite enough that we take due note of many familiar facts of geology 
—of the broken and contorted strata—of the cliffs and precipices far 
from any possible river, or from any possible lines of coast—of the 
caves which very recently were the beds of streams, and are now 
absolutely dissociated from existing lines of drainage—of the gravels 
which cover our plains and ascend high up the slopes of our highest 
mountains—of the evidences of glacial action in times so recent that 
the phenomena are apparently those of yesterday. We have only to 
look at all these things, or indeed at any one of them, to be convinced 
that our earth has been the scene of operations not only in the far 
but in the immediate past, which are not represented in any visible 
operations now. I say ‘‘visible’’ operations, because there is a grand 
distinction here—and I suspect that it is in this distinction that the 
reconciliation lies between the fundamental idea of Lyell’s philosophy 
and the fundamental facts of nature. I suspect that he, and all of us, 
at times, have been confounding two very different things—one is the 
continuity of causes, and the other is uniformity of effects. I believe 
in the first of these: I disbelieve in the second. Nay, more, it is 
because I believe in the first that I find it impossible to believe in 
the second. It is because everything which appears to us to be in 
