406 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
tomed to from their youth, and that cannot stand before the 
light of modern research ? 
However, the great principle of liberty for the teacher, so well 
expressed by the German word “ Lehrfreiheit,” cherished by the 
whole Teutonic race, a principle even preserved in the German 
universities during the darkest days of absolutism is a safe- 
guard of inestimable value, possessed fortunately also by our 
New Zealand university, the d/ma Mater for whose advancement 
to the highest obtainable position and general utility we ought 
willingly to devote our whole strength and best energies. 
HAS THE DEEP OCEAN EVER, BEEN LAND? 
beara bales 
BY PROFESSOR F. .W. HUTTON. 
Badr ed at 
A hundred and fifty years ago if any one had asked the ques- 
tion which heads this article, he would have been laughed at for 
supposing that such changes might have taken place on the 
earth. Fifty, or even twenty years ago he would have been 
thought very ignorant not to know that the science of geology 
had shewn that, during the long history of the earth, the positions 
of oceans and continents had .constantly changed. At the 
present day, however, the question must be considered as 
unsettled, some scientific men supporting the affirmative others 
the negative. . 
Sir C. Lyell, in the last edition of his “Principles of Geology,” 
says :—‘ Continents, although permanent for whole geological 
epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages ;’ and 
further, “ It is not too much to say that every spot which is now ~ 
dry land has been sea some former period, and every part of — 
the space now covered by the deepest ocean has been land” On 
the other hand, in Sir Wyville Thomson’s opinion, “there seems 
to be sufficient evidence that all changes of level since the close © 
of the palseozoic era are in direct relation to the present coast 
lines,” and he thinks there is not a shadow of reason for suppos- — 
ing that the deep oecan beds were ever raised in mass above the ~ 
sea ; such an arrangement, indeed, is to him inconceivable. In 
this opinion he is supported by such men as Darwin, Carpenter, 
Archibald Geikie, and Wallace; while the original idea of the 
permanence of continental areas is due to Professor Dana. 
That the vast majority of sedimentary rocks were formed 
under the sea is allowed by all, but the new school of geologists 
say that when these rocks were forming there must always have 
been land in the neighbourhood from which these sediments 
were derived, and that consequently the general position of the 
continental masses must always have been the same, although © 
their outlines have varied much in different periods, and at times ~ 
the continent may have been represented by groups of islands, 
as the Indian Archipelago at the present day. The phrase, 
