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212 Lyell quarreled with the catastrophists, then, by no means because they assumed that catastrophes occur and have occurred, but because they had got into the habit of calling on their god Catastrophe to help them when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the wheel of observation of the present course of Nature, in order to help themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has become what it is chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts.

So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that can be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated more intensely or more rapidly at any time between the older Tertiary and the oldest Palæozoic epochs than they have done between the older Tertiary epoch and the present day. And if that is so, uniformitarianism, even as limited by Lyell, has no call to lower its crest. But, if the facts were otherwise, the position Lyell took up remains impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of Nature were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now; what he did maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good evidence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet been shown to be incorrect.

I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the "Principles of Geology" in my young days; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was familiar with the truth that "the doctrine of uniformity is not incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown, is taught totidem verbis in that work. Even had it been possible for me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the "Principles," "Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences," published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar, must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound, author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly points out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of catastrophes.