y earthquake
pulses, but by simple, slow, upward swelling of a few feet in a
century; and we have no reason, and therefore no right, to suppose
that Snowdonia was upheaved by any means or at any rate which we do
not witness now; and therefore we are bound to allow, not only that
there was a past "age of ice," but that that age was one of
altogether enormous duration.

But meanwhile some of you, I presume, will be ready to cry--Stop! It
may be our own weakness; but you are really going on too fast and too
far for our small imaginations. Have you not played with us, as well
as argued with us, till you have inveigled us step by step into a
conclusion which we cannot and will not believe? That all this land
should have been sunk beneath an icy sea? That Britain should have
been as Greenland is now? We can't believe it, and we won't.

If you say so, like stout common-sense Britons, who have a wholesome
dread of being taken in with fine words and wild speculations, I
assure you I shall not laugh at you even in private. On the
contrary, I shall say--what I am sure every scientific man will say--
So much the better. That is the sort of audience which we want, if
we are teaching natural science. We do not want haste, enthusiasm,
gobe-moucherie, as the French call it, which is agape to snap up any
new and vast fancy, just because it is new and vast. We want our
readers to be slow, suspicious, conservative, ready to "gib," as we
say of a horse, and refuse the collar up a steep place, saying--I
must stop and think. I don't like the look of the path ahead of me.
It seems an ugly place to get up. I don't know this road, and I
shall not hurry over it. I must go back a few steps, and make sure.
I must see whether it is the right road; whether there are not other
roads, a dozen of them perhaps, which would do as well and better
than this.

This is the temper which finds out truth, slowly, but once and for
all; and I shall be glad, not sorry, to see it in my readers.

And I am bound to say that it has been by that temper that this
theory has been worked out, and the existence of this past age of
ice, or glacial epoch, has been discovered, through many mistakes,
many corrections, and many changes of opinion about details, for
nearly forty years of hard work, by many men, in many lands.

As a very humble student of this subject, I may say that I have been
looking these facts in the face e