Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/68

58 may have been gradual, and the creatures which disappeared may he supposed to have lived on in their modified descendants. But in our own Quaternary period multitudes of the vanishing beasts seem to have been destroyed by some great destruction, many of them leaving no descendants whatever to represent their antique and abandoned forms. Nature has simply obliterated them altogether. All these circumstances, and many more, combine to make this present geological period in which we are still living—the Quaternary period—one of the darkest and most mysterious of all. Thus every possible question which is the most difficult in geology seems crowded and aggregated into the age which stands nearest to us, and to which geologically we ourselves belong.

If, then, there is any one of the halls of science into which we should enter with uncovered heads, it is surely that in which the grand problems of Quaternary geology are handled and discussed. If in her great temple there be any pavement on which a true and wise agnosticism would tread with cautious and humble steps, it is upon that which constitutes the threshold of inquiries so complicated as to facts, so difficult as regards the interpretation of them, and so profound in their bearing upon other subjects of the very highest interest and importance. Yet this is the threshold across which Prof. Huxley comes tripping on the light fantastic toe. It would be hard to say whether his utterances are most conspicuous for their dogmatism or for their levity. All agnosticism is forgotten, and all sense of ignorance is denied or silenced. After pouring out the vials of his wrath and expending the arrows of his ridicule on a conception of the Deluge which nobody entertains, he turns fiercely on a German author who has ventured to suggest that some catastrophe greater than any mere floods of the Euphrates and of the Tigris may possibly have happened among the many and obscure changes recorded in Quaternary geology. Prof. Huxley seems very anxious to get this idea out of his way. He won't hear of it. He knows all about it, at least for the purposes of denial. He does not argue the question. He does not give any reasons. He simply denies the possibility as of his own authority, and pronounces it to be "particularly absurd." This attempt to settle by an ipse dixit what can and what can not possibly have happened during the great physical changes of the Quaternary age, will never do. Even if it were only on account of our utter ignorance of all details respecting those changes, that ignorance is notorious enough to condemn such an attempt as an offense against all the legitimate methods of science.

But there is worse than this in the sentences which follow. Prof. Huxley declares contemptuously that the occurrence of any catastrophe during the Quaternary age, such as could give rise to