﻿Address. 409 



comparatively recent date, or if they actually formed 

 constituent parts of the gravel, then that this was a mere 

 modern alluvium resulting from floods at no very remote 

 period. 



In the course of a few years the main stream of 

 scientific thought left this controversy behind, though 

 a tendency to cut down the lapse of time necessary for all 

 the changes that have taken place in the configuration of 

 the surface of the earth and in the character of its 

 occupants since the time of the Pahcolithic gravels, still 

 survives in the inmost recesses of the hearts of not a few 

 observers. 



In his address to this Association at the Bath meeting 

 of 1864, Sir Charles Lyell struck so true a note that I am 

 tempted to reproduce the paragraph to which I refer: — 



" When speculations on the long series of events which 

 occurred in the glacial and post-glacial periods are 

 indulged in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at 

 the immensity of the time required to interpret the 

 monuments of these ages, all referable to the era of 

 existing species. In order to abridge the number of 

 centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a 

 disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of 

 change in prehistoric times by investing the causes which 

 have modified the animate and inanimate world with 

 extraordinary and excessive energy. It is related of 

 a great Irish orator of our day that when he was about to 

 contribute somewhat parsimoniously towards a public 

 charity, he was persuaded by a friend to make a more 

 liberal donation. In doing so he apologised for his first 

 apparent want of generosity by saying that his early 

 life had been a constant struggle with scanty means, and 

 that ' they who are born to affluence cannot easily imagine 

 how long a time it takes to get the chill of poverty out of 

 one's bones.' In like manner we of the living generation 

 when called upon to make grants of thousands of centuries 



