day. In the early part of
the century, the discoveries of geologists had been the occasion of
great distress to those good people who clung to a literal
interpretation of everything in the Bible. Long before the doctrine of
evolution and the descent of man from lower animals had taken practical
shape, there had been a battle royal between geologists who declared
that the earth was many million years old, and had been inhabited at
least by animals and plants for enormous periods, and those who clung to
the traditional chronology which placed the date of creation only a few
thousand years from now. The continued progress of geology, and the
sturdy championship of it by men like Sedgwick, Chalmers, and Buckland,
who were at the same time reputable theologians and distinguished men of
science, had decided the battle in favour of the conclusions of science,
and it was accepted generally that the earth was almost indefinitely
old. At the same time, another and more strictly scientific dispute had
been in progress. The older school of geologists, looking on the face of
the world, and seeing it scarred by mighty fissures, displaying huge
distortions of the beds in the crust, had argued that geological change
had taken place by a series of mighty catastrophes. The tremendous
results which they saw seemed to them only possible on the theory that
unusual and gigantic displays of force had caused them. On the other
hand, Hutton and Lyell attempted to find adequate explanation of the
greatest changes in the slow forces which may be seen in operation at
the present time. Slow movements of upheaval and depression, amounting
at most to an inch or two in a century, may be shown to be actually in
existence now, and such slow changes acting for very many centuries
would account for the raising of continents above the sea, so that old
sea-bottoms became the surface of the land, and for the depression of
land areas so that new sedimentary rocks might be deposited upon them.
They shewed how air and water slowly crumbled away the hardest rocks,
and how rivers deepened their beds steadily but excessively slowly; and
they held that while great catastrophic changes might occasionally have
occurred, there was ample evidence of the present operation of forces
which, granted sufficient time for their operation, would have made the
crust of the earth such as it is. This doctrine of _Uniformitarianism_,
of the action of similar forces in the past and p