arwin--who was, from first to last, an uncompromising 'uniformitarian.'

We are fully justified, then, in regarding the teaching of Hutton and
Lyell (to which Whewell gave the name of 'uniformitarianism') as being
identical with evolution. The cockpit in which the great battle between
catastrophism and evolution was fought out, as we shall see in the
sequel, was the Geological Society of London, where doughty champions of
each of the rival doctrines met in frequent combat and long maintained
the struggle for supremacy.

Fitton has very truly said that 'the views proposed by Hutton failed to
produce general conviction at the time; and several years elapsed before
any one showed himself publicly concerned about them, either as an enemy
or a friend[20].' Sad is it to relate that, when notice was at last
taken of the memoir on the 'Theory of the Earth,' it was by bitter
opponents--such 'Philistines' (as Huxley calls them) as Kirwan, De Luc
and Williams, who declared the author to be an enemy of religion. Not
only did Hutton, unlike the writers of other theories of the earth, omit
any statement that his views were based on the Scriptures, but, carried
away by the beauty of the system of continuity which he advocated, he
wrote enthusiastically 'the result of this physical enquiry is that we
find no vestige of a beginning--no prospect of an end[21].' This was
unjustly asserted to be equivalent to a declaration that the world had
neither beginning nor end; and thus it came about that Wernerism,
Neptunism and Catastrophism were long regarded as synonymous with
Orthodoxy, while Plutonism and 'Uniformitarianism' were looked upon with
aversion and horror as subversive of religion and morality.

Almost simultaneously with the foundation of the Wernerian Society of
Edinburgh (in 1807) was the establishment in London of the Geological
Society. Originating in a dining club of collectors of minerals, the
society consisted at first almost exclusively of mineralogists and
chemists, including Davy, Wollaston, Sir James Hall, and later, Faraday
and Turner. The bitter but barren conflict between the Neptunists and
the Plutonists was then at its height, and it was, from the first,
agreed in the infant society to confine its work almost entirely to the
collection of facts, eschewing theory. During the first decade of its
existence, it is true, the chief papers published by the society were on
mineralogical questions; but gradually geology beg