226 The American Geologist. October, ises 
prejudices of mankind at large were loosed at a single stroke. Like 
Galileo's assertion of the movement of the globe, this demanded such a 
simple and apparently undignified mode of creation that there is no 
wonder that, even down to the present day, there still exist some to 
whom this is a hard saying, to be taken, if taken at all, in homa?opathic 
doses and with undisguised reluctance. 
Hutton, as regards his philosophy, was, as we know, far in advance of 
his time. With all the boldness of conviction he untlinchingly followed 
out these ideas to their legitimate results. He claimed that as the 
stratified formations were composed of similar materials — sands, clays, 
limestones, and muds — to those now being laid down in the seas around 
our present coasts they must, like them, have' been the products of or- 
dinary natural agencies — of rain, rivers and sea waters, internal heat and 
external cold — acting precisely as they act now. And further as these 
formations lie one below the other, in apparently endless downward 
succession, and are all formed more or less of these fragmentary mate- 
rials, so the present order of natural phenomena must have existed for 
untold ages. Indeed, to the commencement of this order he frankly ad- 
mits, "I see no trace of a beginning or sign of an end." 
The history of the slow acceptance of Hutton's doctrines, even among 
geologists, is, of course, perfectly familiar to us all. William Smith re- 
duced the disputed formations to order, and showed that not only was 
each composed of the ruins of a vanished land, but that each contained 
in its fossils the proof that it was deposited in a vanished sea inhabited 
by special life creation. Cuvier followed, and placed it beyond ques- 
tion that the fossilized relics of these departed beings were such as 
made it absolutely unquestionable that these creatures might well have 
inhabited the earth at the present day. Lyell completed the cycle by 
demonstratinff stage by stage the efficiency of present natural agencies 
to do all the work required for the degradation and rebuilding of the 
formations. Since his da.y the students of stratigraphical geology have 
universally acknowledged that in the study of present geographical 
causes lies the key to the geological formations and the inorganic world 
of the past. 
In this way the road was paved for Darwin and the doctrine of de- 
scent. The aid which had been so ungrudgingly afforded by biology to 
geology was repaid by one of the noblest presents ever made by one 
science to another. For the purposes of geology, the science of biology had 
practically completed a double demonstration: first, that the extinct life 
discernible in the geological formations was linked inseparabl}^ with the 
organic life of the present; and, second, that every fossil recognized by 
the geologist was the relic of a creature that might well have existed upon 
the surface of the earth at the present time. Geology repaid its obligation 
to biology by the still greater two-fold demonstration: first, that in the 
economy of nature the most insignificant causes are competent to the 
grandest effects, if only a sufficiency of time be granted them; and, sec- 
ond, that in the geological formations we have the evidences of the ac- 
tual existence of those mighty eons in which such work might be done. 
