II 
held their ground against the sounder views of less-reputed 
individuals ; though these views have at last tardily been ad- 
mitted as most probable by the highest scientific authorities. 
We have, perhaps, two of the best specimens of such chancres 
m scientific conclusions in Sir Charles LyelFs Address as 
President of the British Association for the Advancement of 
Science, at Bath, m 1864; inasmuch as he there gives up as 
no longer to be regarded as science, the two grand foundation 
tacts (as they previously were regarded) of geological 
science, which were boldly put forth but a few years pre- 
viously as well-ascertamed scientific truths that completelv 
upset the scriptural account of the Creation in the first chapter 
ol trenesis. I allude to what is called the nebulous theory of 
astronomy, with what was founded upon it, the plutonic theory 
oi geology ; and to the supposed existence of azoic ages 
during which it was supposed there was no organic life in this 
world ; a conclusion founded upon what was supposed to be a 
geological “fact," that the lowest sedimentary strata of the 
eaitn were totally devoid of all organic remains. 
No.w, it was upon the assumption of the truth of the nebular 
ieory, and of this proof of the azoic ages of the world, that 
Mr U w. broodwm m "Essays and Reviews" made his dis- 
tinctive attack upon “ the Mosaic Cosmogony." He main- 
tained, as against the scriptural account of the, creation of the 
©aven and the earth, that “the first clear view which we ob- 
tain [from science] of the early condition of the earth, presents 
to us a ball of matter, fluid with intense heat, spinning on its 
own axis and revolving round the sun." This is Laplace's 
nebular theory; only it is put forward by Mr. Goodwin from 
the point when the earth has become “fluid," instead of begin- 
ning at the beginningwhen it was supposed to be in a gaseous 
state, or Mr. Goodwin may have used the word “ fluid 
loose sense, that would comprehend gaseous matter. Hereat 
any rate is a fuller statement of the nebular theory as it appears 
m M - Siguier's “Earth before the Deluge," published in Paris 
so recently as 1863. He says : — 
The theory we are about to develop, and which considers the existing earth 
as an extinguished sun, as a refrigerated star, as a nebula which has passed 
from a gaseous to a solid state, this beautiful conception, which binds together 
in so brilliant a manner geology and astronomy, belongs to the mathematician 
Laplace . . . We have established, in commencing, that the centre of our 
globe is still, in our own day, elevated to 195,000°, a temperature which sur- 
passes all the imagination can conceive. We cannot have any difficulty in 
admitting that, by a heat so excessive, all the materials which now enter into 
the composition of the globe were reduced, at the first, to a gaseous or vaporous 
