Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/63

 antagonism between Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. On the contrary, it is very conceivable that catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity. Let me illustrate my case by analogy. The working of a clock is a model of uniform action ; good time-keeping means uniformity of action. But the striking of the clock is essentially a catastrophe ; the hammer might be made to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, or turn on a deluge of water ; and, by proper arrangement, the clock, instead of marking the hours, might strike at all sorts of irregular intervals, never twice alike in the intervals, force, or number of its blows. Nevertheless all these irregular and apparently lawless catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action ; and we might have two schools of clock- theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.

Still less is there any necessary antagonism between either of these doctrines and that of Evolution, which embraces all that is sound in both Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism, while it rejects the arbitrary assumptions of the one and the, as arbitrary, limitations of the other. Nor is the value of the doctrine of Evolution to the philosophic thinker diminished by the fact that it applies the same method to the living and the not-living world, and embraces in one stupendous analogy the growth of a solar system from molecular chaos, the shaping of the earth from the nebulous cubhood of its youth, through innumerable changes and immeasurable ages, to its present form, and the development of a living being from the shapeless mass of protoplasm we term a germ.

I do not know whether Evolutionism can claim that amount of currency which would entitle it to be called British popular geology ; but, more or less vaguely, it is assuredly present in the minds of most geologists.

Such being the three phases of geological speculation, we are now in a position to inquire which of these it is that Sir William Thomson calls upon us to reform in the passages which I have cited.

It is obviously Uniformitarianism which the distinguished physicist takes to be the representative of geological speculation in general. And thus a first issue is raised, inasmuch as many persons (and those not the least thoughtful among the younger geologists) do not accept strict Uniformitarianism as the final form of geological speculation. We should say, if Hutton and Playfair declare the course of the world to have been always the same, point out the fallacy by all means, but in so doing do not imagine that you are proving modern geology to be in opposition to natural philosophy. I do not suppose that, at the present day, any geologist would be found to maintain absolute Uniformitarianism, to deny that the rapidity of the rotation of the earth may be diminishing, that the sun may be waxing dim, or that the earth itself may be cooling. Most of us, I suspect, are Gallios, " who care for none of these things," being of opinion that, true or fictitious, they have made no practical difference to the earth, during the period of which a record is preserved in stratified deposits.