1877. ] Catastrophism and Evolution. 465 
the biologists, who have tranquilly built upon uniformitarianism, 
and the supposed imperfection of the geological record. I quote 
afew of their characteristic utterances. Lamarck, in his Phi- 
_ losophie Geologique, 1809, says, “ The kinds or species of or- 
ganisms are of unequal age, developed one after another, and 
show only a relative and temporary persistence. Species arise 
out of varieties. ... In the first beginning only the very 
simplest and lowest animals and plants came into existence ; 
those of a more complex organization only at a later period. 
The course of the earth’s development and that of its organic 
inhabitants was continuous, not interrupted by violent revo- 
lutions. . . . e simplest animals and the simplest plants, 
which stand at the lowest point in the scale of organization, have 
originated and still originate by spontaneous generation.” Dar- 
win! says: “ We must be cautious in attempting to correlate as 
strictly contemporaneous two formations, which include few iden- 
tical species, by the general succession of their forms of life. As 
species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still 
acting causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation and by 
catastrophes. . . . And again, for my part, following out Lyell’s 
metaphor, I look at the natural geological record as a history of 
the world imperfectly, kept and written in a changing dialect; 
of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to 
two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a 
short chapter has been preserved; and of each page only here 
and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly changing lan- 
guage in which the history is written, being more or less differ- 
ent in the successive chapters, may represent the apparently 
abruptly changed forms of life entombed in our consecutive but 
widely separated formations. On this view, the difficulties above 
discussed are greatly diminished, or even disappear.” 
It is unnecessary to repeat here the well-known views of Lyell. 
How far biologists have learned to lean on his uniformitarian con- 
clusions may be seen from the following quotation from Haeckel,? 
“He [Lyell] demonstrated that those changes of the earth’s 
surface which are still taking place before our eyes are perfectly 
sufficient to explain everything we know of the development of 
e earth’s crust in general, and that it is superfluous and use- 
less to seek for mysterious causes in inexplicable revolutions. He 
Showed that we need only have recourse to the hypothesis of 
1 Origin of Species, p. 522. 
2 History of Creation, vol. i., pages 127-129. 
VOL. XI.— No. 8. 30 
