212 WARREN UPHAM, M.A., F.G.S.A., ON THE NEBULAR AND 



Vienna in his little monograph, "Ueber den Mond" (Sitzungs- 

 berichten der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien). 

 In his " Rede Lecture " before the University of Cambridge in 

 1893, Professor Bonney, F.R.S., has confirmed a good deal that 

 was contained in my previous work ; so also has much that is 

 contained in Lord Kelvin's address to the Victoria Institute in 

 1897. 



I am inclined, upon the whole, to look upon the Huronian phyllites 

 and Grauwacke (as the late Roland D. Irving has described them)* 

 as furnishing the record of the beginning of the hydrosphere; 

 though, as I have pointed out in my book (pp. 54-55), traces of 

 water may have been caught up in the formation, under great 

 atmospheric pressure, of such basic minerals as hornblende, 

 muscovite, etc., of the earlier crystalline schists, even in the 

 pre-oceanic stage ; an hypothesis, which has received experimental 

 demonstration since from the splendid work of M. de Kroustchoff 

 of St. Petersburg in the synthesis of such minerals (see Nature, 

 vol. xliii, p. 545). With the glimpses we thus get through the aeons 

 of the past, we may well agree with the concluding remark of 

 Mr. Upham's paper, when he says, " In the new views opened by 

 the hypotheses noticed in this paper the range of geologic inquiries 

 and theories is extended almost in conceivably further back, through 

 the laying of the foundations of the earth." Only, as I could 

 show more fully if space permitted, those views have not quite the 

 novelty which he seems to claim for them. It is pertinent also to 

 remark that Mr. Upham has done good service in bringing them 

 forward in the way he has done, and thus driving another nail 

 or two into the coffin of the Hutton-Playfair-Lyell Uniformitarian 

 dogma. (See remarks by myself in the Geol. Mag. for June, 1892, 

 with quotation from Lord Kelvin on "Dissipation of Energy.") 



I see no reason for unsaying what I wrote in 1888, when I said, 

 " The Archaean stage of the earth's history is seen to fall into a place 

 in a natural order of development, and one more chapter is added to 

 the history of the operation of the great Law of Evolution, which is 

 written upon all created things. As the mists and clouds thus 

 disperse, our intellectual vision begins to descry a boundary to 

 geologic time, and the physical geologist begins to feel that over 



* " Is there a Huronian Group V (Amer. Journ. of Science, vol. xxxiv.) 



