136 
VoL. I. 
The Queensland Naturalist, 
forbears were not here to ha\ ^ an account at all. He gave 
us a fcAV huadred million years but afterwards cut it 
down to some thirty or at most fifty million. 
42. — Huxley went out to fight this Goliath ^vith a 
pebble— that is, a small geological specimen. Now, 
rluxley’s conclusion, in my opinion, was the correct one, 
but his argument was so utterly feeble and beside the mark 
that Sir William first ground it to poAvder, and then blew it 
a ^ ay at a breath. Both parties were right ; but K(4vin 
s ood on firm ground, and the other didn^t and couldn't 
see the hard rock his opponent stuck his heels into. 
43. — Palaeontologists and evolutionists had to ])ull 
up short. It Avas no use girding against equations. Their 
long-draAvn genealogies had to be compressed or abandoned 
— and they kncAc those genealogies, in the main, were 
honest though they might not be quite so lengthy as wars 
fondly imagined. 
44. — But Lord Kelvin did not dogmatise. He said 
that if the Sun went on losing heat at the present rate, 
and if its fuel were not replenished, then his fires must 
assuredly burn out Avithin a limited number of years, say 
four or six million years, and just as certainly can they 
only have been lit some tAventy million years previously. 
This is his latest estimate (1889). 
45. — But there A\as a fuel that Avould largely replenish 
the 8un, and it Avas discovered just ten years after Kelvin’s 
])ronouncement. In Radium, \A'e have, it seems pretty 
certainly, a heat-generator sufficiently powerful to keep 
the Sun going a good many million years. Perhaps, it 
has kept it going for as long a period as ])aia}ontologists 
sigh for. but on this point I suspend my judgment. It 
may be that radium as an element is not very old as elements 
go. Jhit this is outside our x)rescribed limits. 
40,— Wliat 1 wish to make plain, and 1 can’t find 
anyone who has yet realised the vital point f am aiming at, 
is that &ven if the Sun and Earth were infinitely old it would 
not help Darwinian evolutionists one tittle. What they 
really need is an explanation not of such gaps as are clamautly 
heralded by unconformities, but of those palaeontological 
gaps in conformable strata on which I have been insisting. 
No lengthening of days has any bearing upon the changes 
of s])ecies Avithin time represented by the continuous 
deposition of a film of mud no thicker than a visiting card. 
47. fSome ten years ago, Prof. George DarAvin, son of 
Charles DarAvin, showed that the day is shortening by a 
fraction of a second in a thousand years, and the Moon is 
leisurely receding from us. Calculating back, he found 
the moon AA'as once in contact with, that is formed part of, 
the Earth. But G. HaiAvin did not, so far as 1 recollect 
