326 
no less than eight feet in thickness.* According to M. de 
Perthes* doctrine these Roman roads must have been formed 
48,000 years ago ! So much for the unity and certainty of some 
scientific doctrines, as to the time required for nature’s opera- 
tions, even when “ facts ” are within our reach. 
And here let me ask. Suppose Professor Huxley to agree 
with the eminent Frenchman, what might be thought were 
I to put to him the puerile and uncomplimentary question, 
whether he is prepared to argue that the Roman roads were 
made and “ put under ” the peat after it had grown, rather 
than honestly admit the fact that the peat has grown after the 
roads were formed ? — He ought not, in my opinion, to have 
introduced that kind of interrogation, with reference to the 
Nile mud and the pyramids; and I make this allusion by 
way of warning that however eminent may be his position, 
it would really be for his own credit, and perhaps safer, to 
avoid that style of controversy. Even if our arguments 
fail, we may at least avoid mere gratuitous and unprovoked 
sneering. 
To revert to the chalk and other sea-bottom formations. I 
believe that truly scientific men do not profess to know the 
probable rate of their growth. A calculation has however 
been made that taking one single shell of the foraminifera, 
only one ten-thousandth part of a cubic inch in size, and 
granting that from one such organism 10 only would be pro- 
duced in the course of a whole year, and that the original 
progenitor would then die ; and supposing each one of the 10 
merely to multiply at the same exceedingly moderate rate, and 
to produce 10 each per annum ; — and so of the 100, and of the 
1,000, — 10,000, and 100,000 afterwards produced i the 
result would be that in less than a single century, — in less 
than 100 years of such slow reproduction and growth, — a solid 
mass of the exuvige of the chalk foraminifera would be pro- 
duced more than equal to the cubic contents of the whole 
earth. 
I know that for a moment this will appear incredible. I 
need only ask, Is it true ? It is no mere vague conjecture. 
It is a matter of figures and computation and of absolute 
demonstration. It is not a mere vague assertion, of 30,000 or of 
a million years, without the least data to prove it. If it be 
said that the foraminifera or the nummulites cannot reproduce 
ten each of their species per annum, let “ science ” tell us that. 
* Vide The Age of Man, Sc. By Professor Kirk, Mem. Viet. Inst., 
pp. 75, 76. (Bond., Walford, Jackson, & Hodder.) I may add, on the 
authority of Professor Kirk, that certain moss-farmers say that the peat on 
their farms grows at the rate of 2^ inches in a year. 
