has no call to lower its crest. But if
the facts were otherwise, the position Lyell took up remains
impregnable. He did not say that the geological operations of nature
were never more rapid, or more vast, than they are now; what he did
maintain is the very different proposition that there is no good
evidence of anything of the kind. And that proposition has not yet
been shown to be incorrect.

I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the "Principles of
Geology" in my young days; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was
familiar with the truth that "the doctrine of uniformity is not
incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown,
is taught _totidem verbis_ in that work. Even had it been possible for
me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the
"Principles," Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,"
published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar,
must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound,
author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly points
out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of
catastrophes.

With regard to such occurrences [earthquakes, deluges,
etc.], terrible as they appear at the time, they may not
much affect the average rate of change: there may be a
_cycle_, though an irregular one, of rapid and slow change:
and if such cycles go on succeeding each other, we may still
call the order of nature uniform, notwithstanding the
periods of violence which it involves.[24]

The reader who has followed me through this brief chapter of the
history of geological philosophy will probably find the following
passage in the paper of the Duke of Argyll to be not a little
remarkable:--

Many years ago, when I had the honor of being President of
the British Association,[25] I ventured to point out, in the
presence and in the hearing of that most distinguished man
[Sir C. Lyell] that the doctrine of uniformity was not
incompatible with great and sudden changes, since cycles of
these and other cycles of comparative rest might well be
constituent parts of that uniformity which he asserted.
Lyell did not object to this extended interpretation of his
own doctrine, and indeed expressed to me his entire
concurrence.

I should think he did; for, as I have shown, there was nothing in it
that Lyell himself had