tes, not as
turned out like manufactured articles, ready made, at measured
intervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as due to the
slow and gradual working of natural laws, in accordance with which each
has assumed by force of circumstances its existing place, weight, orbit,
and motion.

The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making,
which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of the
universe at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to the
outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While the
astronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyell
and his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth's
surface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world began
by being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internal
excitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, it
gradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old is
growing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers. As it passed
from its fiery and volcanic youth to its staider and soberer middle age,
a solid crust began to form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface.
The aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heated
mass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell.
Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies that
sank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic,
Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the
cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain
ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very
vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more
diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, with
delightful regularity.

At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, peninsulas and
islands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, were wrought out by
internal or external energies on the crust thus generally fashioned.
Evaporation from the oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms;
the water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys and river
basins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into streams, streams into
primaeval Niles, and Amazons, and Mississippis. Volcanic forces uplifted
here an Alpine c