Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/71

Rh smile and a shrug," etc. This is quite true. But it is also true that the attitude of mind thus depicted is most unsafe and most unphilosophical. I confess to having myself lain under the incubus of the same preconceptions for many years. It was of course easy to take refuge in the bolt-hole dug out by Lyell—that if there ever was a deluge it must have been 'an event so "preternatural" in all its circumstances and effects that there is no use in even thinking of it in connection with any of the physical sciences. Yet the promptings of our intellectual conscience will perforce suggest that, though belief and reason are not coincident in extent, they ought to be coincident in direction, and that physical events of great magnitude, if they happened at all, however preternatural, were presumably brought about by physical agencies which must have left some effects behind them, unless subsequent obliteration has destroyed the evidence. This last alternative was indeed easily conceivable in the abstract. It is, however, always less easily conceivable in each actual case in proportion to the magnitude of the supposed events and the recency of their supposed occurrence. But this method of looking at the whole case, which is purely logical and scientific—this perception of alternatives turning upon evidence, and on the possible causes of the want of any evidence at all—is a method which at once awakens our intelligence to the testimony of facts, and breaks down the stupid preconceptions which blind us to the true interpretation of them. It puts an end to that irrational attitude of the mind which Prof. Huxley, strange to say, seems to approve of and applaud, in which we can hardly be persuaded "to occupy ourselves in any way" with a great problem, and in which we can only look at it "with a smile and a shrug."

Once roused from this paralysis of our reason, we soon find that there are abundant materials on which to exercise its powers. I live in a district of country over the whole of which the evidence of "the great submergence" is as striking as it 'is ubiquitous. I estimate the depth of it as having been at least two thousand feet. Not less decisive is the evidence that it must have happened among the very latest operations which have been at work upon the globe. Charles Darwin saw this in 1839, when he came to the West Highlands to look at the famous Parallel Roads of Glen Roy. His estimate of the minimum depth of it was at least 1,280 feet. He saw it, and he dwelt upon it with emphasis in the celebrated paper in which he recorded his observations. No one who resides in the low country where the rocks are never seen except in quarries, can have any conception how clear and unmistakable are the proofs of some temporary, and very recent, depression of our land, with almost all its mountains, under the level of the sea. Then comes corroboration after corroboration from every field of