﻿XXX11 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



feeling, he declares it to be the duty of theologians to sympathise 

 with scientific men in the doubts they entertain respecting many 

 dogmas closely interwoven with the popular faith, and he insists on 

 the inseparable relation of scientific and religious truth. All attempts 

 to tamper with the evidence of physical facts, or to evade or set them 

 aside, are denounced ; and he exposes the repeated failure of various 

 schemes for torturing the Hebrew text so as to make it speak the 

 language of modern philosophy. He also alludes to the final aban- 

 donment, by every competent authority, of those theories which aimed 

 at establishing a coincidence between geological epochs and the six 

 days of creation. I am bound to confess that some of Dr. Pye 

 Smith's own efforts to remove difficulties, by modifying the ordinary 

 interpretations of the Hebrew text, are to my mind as unsuccessful 

 as those of the greater number of his predecessors ; but I feel con- 

 vinced that if that voluminous class of books commonly called Scrip- 

 tural Geologies, several of which have issued from the press even 

 since our last anniversary, had been written with the same candour 

 and fairness of spirit as that of Dr. Pye Smith, the public mind 

 would have become ere this too enlightened to waste any more of its 

 energies on controversies of this nature. 



The amiable disposition and unaffected piety of Dr. Pye Smith 

 secured to him the love and admiration of all who knew him ; and it 

 redounds to the honour of the congregational sect in which for nearly 

 half a century he held a prominent station, that the work I have 

 cited was generally well received, and when he retired from his aca- 

 demical office, the sum of <g£3000 was subscribed to provide for him 

 an annuity during his life, and to endow after his death Divinity 

 scholarships bearing his name in the new College now founded in 

 St. John's Wood. 



Gentlemen, — In my Anniversary Address of last year, I entered 

 into an examination of the question, how far the leading discoveries 

 of modern date tend to confirm or invalidate a doctrine which I had 

 advocated twenty years before, in the first edition of my * Principles 

 of Geology,' — that the ancient changes of the animate and inanimate 

 world, of which we find memorials in the earth's crust, may be 

 similar both in kind and degree to those which are now in progress. 



