554 
Notices of Books, 
[October, 
age of the earth — as scarcely worth the paper upon which they 
are written ? Mathematical demonstration is irresistible when 
applied to abstractions, but when it seeks to deal with realities it 
is often vitiated by being based upon false, or at best groundless, 
premises. The question is quietly and adroitly begged in such 
expressions as “ Let us suppose, “ If we only assume,” &c., and 
the public — dazzled and awed by the display of formulae — never 
look beneath at the flimsy foundation. 
But the lingering belief in the recent origin of our earth is not 
his only prepossession. Towards the end of the work he declares 
his belief that the earth has not reached its present condition, but 
has been finished off at once according to specification, like a 
contract job — if we may be allowed the comparison — by a First 
Cause, aCting direCtly and from without ! Because the “ scien- 
tific mind ” — which his own is apparently not — repudiates an 
assumption so degrading, so unworthy of Deity, it is charged 
with “ a stubborn resistance to the belief in a First Cause.” 
Can he fail to see that if such be the origin and the earlier history 
of the earth, the very existence of geology is destroyed ? But 
let us quote some of the passages in which he places his anti- 
scientific creed in the fullest daylight : — “ One vast fallacy would 
appear to underlie the doCtrine of Modern Causes, the supposition 
that the world we inhabit — so beautiful, so pregnant with every 
gift which can contribute to man’s progress, prosperity, and hap- 
piness — has been turned out by its Maker unfinished and imper- 
fect ; that it is capable of improvement, at least of development, 
and is undergoing material change day by day.” “ Is there any 
inconsistency in supposing that when a potter moulds a vase out 
of a lump of clay he should put forth his greatest energy and 
exert his utmost skill to finish it and turn it out perfeCl ? That 
the work of the creation of the earth was one of perfection defies 
all disproof. What need, then, to imagine that it was done by 
little and little ? least of all can we admit a solution of the pro- 
blem of cosmogony, involving the absurdity that the work was 
left unfinished and needs constant alteration by means of certain 
mechanical self-aCting operations. We venture to hope that the 
more geology is studied in an earnest spirit, free from the mirage 
of attractive but shadowy hypotheses, the more it will be acknow- 
ledged that not blind force, however gentle, nor mechanical im- 
pulses, however gradual, rendered our planet what we find it. 
It will eventually be acknowledged that at the time and in the 
process of fashioning the globe, a power was exerted totally 
different from the present course of nature.” Here, then, the 
secret is revealed. The author’s real difficulties in the way of 
accepting the truths- of geology are his preconceptions of what is 
an “ absurdity,” of what is “ perfection,” and of how, in his 
opinion, the “ First Cause ” ought to have worked ! With a man 
who can seriously maintain that the channels of rivers were made 
for them and not by them, it is impossible to argue. Had he been 
