\ 
450 Catastrophism and Evolution. [ August, 
that sort of knowledge, presupposes, nay, even develops, an in- 
tellect both vital and broad. If in America Science as a mode of 
education has won her way to the front, it is due, in prominent 
measure, to the honest training of the Sheffield Scientific School, 
and time will render this institution its unfailing reward. 
Honored by the invitation to address you to-day, I have chosen 
to present a contribution to the theory of catastrophism and its 
connection with evolution, feeling that, however slight this con- 
tribution may be, as my own it is a direct outgrowth of this 
school, and that if I turn from the far greater and more attract- 
ive achievements of others, from the wealth of literary and phil- 
osophic materials which press forward for utterance, and bring 
here something which I have reached myself, it will afford you a 
more intimate interest. I have hoped, too, that other graduates 
might feel as I have, and that year by year men might stand 
here, fresh from the battle-field of life, out of the very heat of the 
strife, to tell us of their struggles, and hang the shields they have 
won along the walls of this temple of science. I ask you then to 
listen to a plain statement of my views of catastrophism and the 
evolution of environment. 
The earliest geological induction of primeval man is the doc- 
trine of terrestrial catastrophe. This ancient belief has its roots 
in the actual experience of man, who himself has been witness of 
certain terrible and destructive exhibitions of sudden, unusual 
telluric energy. Here in America our own species has seen the 
vast, massive eruptions of Pliocene basalt, the destructive inva 
sion of northern lands by the slow-marching ice of the glacii 
period, has struggled with the hardly conceivable floods which. 
marked the recession of the frozen age, has felt the solid earth 
shudder beneath its feet and the very continent change its con- 
figuration. Yet these phenomena are no longer repeated ; noth- 
ing comparable with them ever now breaks the geologic calm. 
Catastrophism is therefore the survival of a terrible impression 
burned in upon the very substance of human memory. The doc- 
trine was also arrived at in very early times by our modern 
method of reasoning from marine fossils observed to be entombed 
in rocky beds far removed from the present seas, — beds which 
compel the natural inference that they are sea bottoms upheaved. 
This induction is poetically touched in the Rig Vedas, is stated m 
scientific method with surprising frequency among the Greeks 
and recurs in the writings of most earth-students ever since. — 
Plutarch in his Morals gives a vivid account of an interview  — 
