es of an infinite and eternal Being."[9]

[Footnote 9: _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 613.]

The limitations implied in these passages appear to me to constitute the
weakness and the logical defect of Uniformitarianism. No one will impute
blame to Hutton that, in face of the imperfect condition, in his day, of
those physical sciences which furnish the keys to the riddles of geology,
he should have thought it practical wisdom to limit his theory to an
attempt to account for "the present order of things"; but I am at a loss
to comprehend why, for all time, the geologist must be content to regard
the oldest fossiliferous rocks as the _ultima Thule_ of his science; or
what there is inconsistent with the relations between the finite and the
infinite mind, in the assumption, that we may discern somewhat of the
beginning, or of the end, of this speck in space we call our earth. The
finite mind is certainly competent to trace out the development of the
fowl within the egg; and I know not on what ground it should find more
difficulty in unravelling the complexities Of the development of the
earth. In fact, as Kant has well remarked,[10] the cosmical process is
really simpler than the biological.

[Footnote 10: "Man darf es sich also nicht befremden lassen, wenn ich
mich unterstehe zu sagen, dass eher die Bildung aller Himmelskoerper, die
Ursache ihrer Bewegungen, kurz der Ursprung der gantzen gegenwaertigen
Verfassung des Weltbaues werden koennen eingesehen werden, ehe die
Erzeugung eines einzigen Krautes oder einer Raupe aus mechanischen
Gruenden, deutlich und vollstaendig kund werden wird."--KANT'S _Saemmtliche
Werke_, Bd. i. p. 220.]

This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive
and deductive reasoning from the things which are, to those which were--
this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost
Uniformitarianism the place, as the permanent form of geological
speculation, which it might otherwise have held.

It remains that I should put before you what I understand to be the third
phase of geological speculation--namely, EVOLUTIONISM.

I shall not make what I have to say on this head clear, unless I diverge,
or seem to diverge, for a while, from the direct path of my discourse, so
far as to explain what I take to be the scope of geology itself. I
conceive geology to be the history of the earth, in precisely the same
sense as biology is the history of living beings; and I trust you will
n