4 
1877. ] Catastrophism and Evolution. 451 
between an Egyptian priest and wise Solon, who, in the open- 
mindedness of a truly great man searching after immemorial 
knowledge, had come to sit at his feet to listen. Calmly and 
with the few broad touches of a master, in that simple eloquence 
which comes of really knowing, the priest tells him of the catas- 
trophes of submergence and upheaval which the earth’s surface 
has suffered; and his method was identically ours of to-day. 
What a picture! Solon the wise, inheritor of the Hellenic cult- 
ure, master of the polished learning of his country and his day, 
sitting within the shades of that hoary temple, listening devoutly 
to the words of one who spoke as out of the dark vault of the past 
and told how the solid continents were things of a time, born but 
lately from the womb of the sea. 
When complete evidence of the antiquity of man in California 
and the catastrophes he has survived come to be generally under- 
stood, there will cease to be any wonder that a theory of the 
destructive in nature is an early, deeply rooted archaic belief, . 
most powerful in its effect on the imagination. Catastrophe, 
speaking historically, is both an awful memory of mankind and 
a very early piece of pure scientific induction. After it came to 
be woven into the Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Mohammedan cosmog- 
onies, its perpetuation was a matter of course. 
From the believers in catastrophe there is, however, a totally 
different class of minds, whose dominant characteristic is a posi- 
tive refusal to look further than the present, or to conceive con- 
itions which their senses have never reported. They lack the 
very mechanism of* imagination. They suffer from a species of 
intellectual near-sightedness too lamentably common among all 
grades and professions of men. They are bounded — I might al- 
most say imprisoned — by the evident facts and ideas of their own 
to-day and their own environment. With that sort of detective 
sharpness of vision which is often characteristic of those who 
cannot see far beyond: their noses, these men have most ably ac- 
cumulated «an impressive array of geological facts relating to the 
existing operation of natural laws. They have saturated them- 
selves with the present modus operandi of geological energy, and 
culminating in Lyell have founded the British School of Uni- 
formitarianism. 
Men are born either catastrophists or uniformitarians. You 
may divide the race into imaginative people who believe in all 
Sorts of impending crises, — physical, social, political, — and 
others who anchor their very souls ¢ in statu quo. There are men 
