127 
Mar. 31, 1910. The Queensland Naturalist. 
October 23rd, B.C. 4004. Archbishop Usher had worked 
it out, and there was no more to be said. If the rocks 
seemed to tell a different story, so much the worse for the 
rocks. If Cuvier’s fossil mammals seemed to have been 
even a week older than this, they either lied or were a 
sort of joke— not real fossils at all. Adam had under- 
taken, once and for all, the task Linnseus and others long 
after made such a mess of. He named and classified all 
the animals, he himself having been born on Friday, 
October 28th of the same memorable year. How foolish 
it all seems to us now ^ But it rvas very real fifty years 
ago — a century ago it was well-nigh all-powerful. It is 
not quite dead yet, this annus mirabilis. and the mass of 
the people still look askance, and whiff sulphur when 
you tell them man witnessed the last glacial epoch. 
6. — The rejection of philosophical ideas by the un- 
trained is natural ; but it was the trained philosophers 
who, as a class, refused to accept the new views. They 
demanded more evidence. The whole energy of geologists 
had to be expended in driving home proof on proof of the 
immensity of time necessary to lay down the sedimentary 
rocks. At last they hammered the truth in, till now the 
lad at school babbles of aeons, as if a million years were not 
a very solemn, and seldom comprehended. thing. 
Geologists ran riot too, and handled hundreds and 
thousands of millions as if they were Rockfellers with un- 
limited credit on the bank of time. Nor A^'ere they the 
only spendthrifts. 
7. —Palaeontologists oj^ened their own account. True, 
the stratigraphist needed vast supplies of time to pile 
his twenty miles of detritus grain by grain ; true, that 
he Avanted more than this because his Avork Avas intermittent, 
and there Avere long periods of enforced rest from the 
labours of sedimentation. But the palaeontologist re- 
quired still larger drafts for he required time for the jAlacid 
performance of the duties of life. The stratigraphist 
must not shoot his sand and mud into the ocean so 
energetically as to overAA’helm the creatures that SAvam 
in the Avaters or crawled upon the sea-bed, or ])urroAved 
into it waiting for their daily bread. The sea-floor must 
be a playground as Avell as a grave-yard. And so the 
tale of years was told out AA'ithout stint. 
8. — By the time this Avas granted, a ncAv Avave of 
thought gathered force. Geology had not only Avon the 
battle of time, but palaeontology had peopled that time 
Avith plant and animal from the muds of the estuaries of 
to-day, back to the old muds of the Cambrian. And, 
further, as one delved deeper into the crust, the types 
of life Avere found to grow less familiar and, on the whole, 
simpler. Some ten millions of distinct species, it was 
shoAvn, had lived, or Avere living ; it Avas asking too much 
