nes which all
thought to be necessary conclusions from them. The great heroic workers
of that day--while they were laying well and truly the foundations of
historical geology--were, one and all, indifferent to, or violently
opposed to, the Huttonian teaching. Neither Fitton nor John Phillips,
who at a later date showed sympathy with evolutionary doctrines, were
the men to fight the battle of an unpopular cause.

Attempts have been made by both Playfair and Fitton to explain how it
was that Hutton's teaching failed to arrest the attention it deserved.
The former justly asserted that the world was tired of the performances
issued under the title of 'theories of the earth'; and that the
condensed nature of Hutton's writings, with their 'embarrassment of
reasoning and obscurity of style[25]' are largely responsible for the
neglect into which they fell.

Fitton, in 1839, wrote in the _Edinburgh Review_, 'The original work of
Hutton (in two volumes) is in fact so scarce that no very great number
of our readers can have seen it. No copy exists at present in the
libraries of the Royal Society, the Linnean, or even the Geological
Society of London[26]!' He also points out that Hutton's work, and even
the more lucid _Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory_, were almost
unknown on the continent, owing to the isolation of Great Britain during
the war; and he even suggests that the popularity of Playfair in this
country may have not improbably led to the neglect of the original work
of Hutton[27].

On the continent, indeed, the authority of Cuvier was supreme, and in
his _Essay on the Theory of the Earth_, prefixed to his _Opus
magnum_--the _Ossemens Fossiles_--the great naturalist threw the whole
weight of his influence into the scale of Catastrophism. He maintained
that a series of tremendous cataclysms had affected the globe--the last
being the Noachian deluge--and that the floods of water that overspread
the earth, during each of these events, had buried the various groups of
animals, now extinct, that had been successively created.

If anything had been wanted in England to support and confirm the views
that were then supposed to be the only ones in harmony with the
Scriptures, it was found in the great authority of Cuvier. As Zittel
justly says, Cuvier's theory of 'World-Catastrophies'--'which afforded a
certain scientific basis for the Mosaic account of the "Flood," was
received with special cordiality in England, for ther