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enormous periods required for the other successions of strata 
all deposited and laid upon one another ; but especially as un- 
worthy of notice when compared with the chalk. For his 
culminating assertion was, “a million years could not have 
produced this chalk deposit of 1,100 feet thick.” He seemed 
prepared to rest his whole case upon this ; so here then let 
us now join issue. But I select the chalk not only as his 
strongest point, but also because, as regards the chalk, he 
favoured us with some show of argument, deduced from the 
analogy of what we know of the present chalky ooze of the 
Atlantic. I accept the analogy as a fair one, upon which a 
cogent argument might be based, bearing upon the old chalk 
formations. Let us now therefore examine how much of 
cogency may be discovered in the argument of Professor 
Huxley. 
But here I regret to be obliged to point out, that he was 
exceedingly chary and vague in the information he thought 
proper to communicate, in order to establish the probability 
of his scientific doctrine. Probably all who heard him knew 
long before 21st November last, that chalk is mainly made up 
of microscopical shells, and that in drawing a chalk-lino upon 
the black board, as he graphically did, the white mark was 
almost literally “ a line of skeletons.” 
Perhaps, also, most of those who heard him knew long ago, 
all that he chose to tell them then, about the ooze of the Atlantic. 
Whether it was that he considered the argument from the 
ooze to the chalk as too obvious to require to be fully stated, 
or whether it was that its whole import was so clear in his 
own mind that he forgot to give it expression ; certain it is, 
that, except to say that the ooze is essentially a kind of grey 
chalk in the process of formation, and to call it a “deposit,” he 
told us nothing. He told us nothing especially of the rate, 
either actual or conjectural, at which the ooze now accumulates 
in the Atlantic Ocean, though that was apparently intended to 
be the sole criterion for calculating the more than a million 
years for laying down the old chalk formations. Neither did 
he even hint to his audience how the Atlantic ooze is known 
or supposed to accumulate. Nor did he think it incumbent 
upon him to advance a single argument, whether cogent or 
not, to show that the old chalk formations must have been 
accumulated in precisely similar circumstances as the present 
ooze of the Atlantic, — except (about which there can be no 
question) that the one like the other accumulated at the 
bottom of the sea. 
It was, therefore, in order to enable him to supply these 
omissions and to complete his own argument, that I ventured 
