Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/262

250 And it was because it passed from being a science of the earth to become a mere study of rocks and fossils that Hutton was able to make his famous declaration that as a result of his inquiries into the system of Nature he could discover "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." Apart from this, however, and in its self-limited career, geology pursued a luminous advance, and as it did so the Noachian deluge began to sink into an oblivion which it might be thought to have scarcely merited. For if the biblical account is to be taken literally, it furnishes us with a catastrophe of the first order; and since it is said to have occurred comparatively recently, or at least in historic time, the uniformitarian, by his own principles, would have been compelled to infer, as the catastrophist had done, that such deluges form a part of the orderly scheme of the world. The universality of the deluge had, however, for various reasons, been denied, not only by geologists, but by writers of other schools of thought, and toward the middle of the century belief in it among the learned was gradually expiring; such a number and variety of convincing arguments as converged against it could indeed but lead to that result; and that the deluge, so far from being universal, was a local and very local phenomenon, became an article of belief so settled among all good geologists—and I think I may add theologists—that it may be said to have finally fallen into the deep slumber of a decided opinion, from which I for one have no desire to arouse it.

Thus the deluge, so far from shaking the uniformitarian position, was rather itself submerged by uniformitarian views, and growing geology was in danger of taking the uniformitarian formula for an infallible dogma. It was saved from this by physics, a clever brother of its own, which had now discovered the famous principle of the "conservation of energy," and another equally famous, "the dissipation of energy." From these it was deducible that the duration of the earth as a living planet must be strictly limited in time. It must have had a beginning, and at the beginning was furnished with a store of energy, which it has ever since been spending. In this spending of energy its life consists, and when the store is at length exhausted its life will cease, and it will become numbered among the dead planets.

A good deal of this uniformitarian geology might perhaps itself have guessed, had it extended its views beyond rocks and fossils to the stars and other shining bodies which people the vast realms of space. The present, then, strange to say, will still afford a key to the past. We have but to turn to the sun, our nearest luminary, though still more than ninety millions of miles away from us, and in that great orb we find much to suggest the state of our planet some ninety millions of years ago or more.