OPINIONS OF VOLTAIRE AND LAPLACE REGARDING GEOLOGY. 311 
modified to meet the peculiar views of ecclesiastical writers on 
the Deluge. Eighty more years were required to make any 
advance in the face of opposition, no longer from the old hut 
from the new methods of religious thought and practice ; and 
the end of the seventeenth century witnessed the development 
of more careful stratigraphical work, and of the grand theories 
of Leibnitz. The first half of the eighteenth century found 
geology a long way from the position which it occupied as 
a logical science at its close, when Hutton had elaborated his 
grand ideas of uniformity and continuity. Taking the age of 
Hutton as a stand-point, it is interesting to search out what 
was the nature of the common knowledge, regarding geology, 
amongst educated people before and about his time. What it 
was, may he well gleaned from the published works of two men 
of great genius, of very different kinds of minds, the one with- 
out any scientific animus, and the other devoted to exact know- 
ledge. Both were distinguished Frenchmen, the one living 
before Hutton, and being the representative of the highest liter- 
ary culture of an age of the greatest mental ferment; the other 
flourishing subsequently as the most distinguished mathemati- 
cian of the Napoleonic age. They were Yoltaire and Laplace. 
Yoltaire, detested as he was by the most powerful class in 
France, nevertheless attracted around him the advanced thinkers 
of his day ; and his writings, so seldom read now-a-days, partly 
from prejudice and partly from the blatant impurity of many 
of them, indicate that he was unusually well read in all the 
subjects which were then attracting attention. He was an 
advanced representative man, at war with the priests and with 
the State when they endeavoured to override civil and religious 
liberty ; his weapons were the keenest satire and the broadest 
humour, and they were none the less offensive because they 
were highly tempered in consonance with the manners and open 
vice of his age. A master of the art of ridicule, he often wore 
a mask of truth to render his shafts the more poisonous ; and, 
indeed, it is often extremely difficult to know when he is 
serious or when joking. His scientific attainments were obtained, 
not in order that they should lead to further truths, but that 
they should be weapons against bad logic, the general dispo- 
sition to accept every statement, made on authority, to be true, 
and against what he conceived to be unreasonable in Scripture. 
Take a chapter of his in his Physique as an example, which is 
headed, ‘ On the Changes which have occurred in our Globe, 
and on the Petrifactions which are pretended to be their 
Evidences : ’ — 
‘ There are some errors which belong to the people, and 
there are others which only relate to philosophers. Perhaps 
the idea of so many physicists, that evidences are observable 
