and that there his respectability ceases for the
time, and he becomes eminently ridiculous. The anti-geologists,--men of
considerably smaller calibre than the massive Dutch divine of the
seventeenth century,--also enter into a field not their own. Passing
from the theologic province, they obtrude into that of the geologist,
and settle against him, apparently after a few minutes' consideration,
or as mere special pleaders, questions on which he has been
concentrating the patient study and directing the laborious explorations
of years. And an exhibition by specimen of the nonsense to which they
have in this way committed themselves in their haste, may not be wholly
uninstructive. But I must defer the display till another evening. I
shall do them no injustice; but I trust it will be forgiven me should I
exhibit, as they have exhibited themselves, a class of writers to whose
assaults I have submitted for the last fourteen years without
provocation and without reply.

LECTURE TENTH.

THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS.

It has been well remarked, that that writer would be equally in danger
of error who would assign very abstruse motives for the conduct of great
bodies of men, or very obvious causes for the great phenomena of nature.
The motives of the masses,--on a level always with the average
comprehension,--are never abstruse; the causes of the phenomena, on the
other hand, are never obvious. And when these last are hastily sought
after, not from any devotion to scientific truth, or any genuine love of
it, but for some purpose of controversy, we may receive it as a sure and
certain fact that they will not be found. Some mere plausibility will be
produced instead, bearing on its front an obviousness favorable mayhap
to its reception for the time by the vulgar, but in reality fatal to its
claims in the estimate of all deep thinkers; while truth will meanwhile
lie concealed far below, in the bottom of her well, until patiently
solicited forth by some previously unthought of process, in the
character of some wholly unanticipated result. Such, in the history of
science, has been the course and character of error on the one hand, and
of actual discovery on the other: the error has been always
comparatively obvious,--the discovery unexpected and abstruse. And as
men descend in the scale of accomplishment or intellect, a nearer and
yet nearer approximation takes place between their conceptions of the
causes of the occu