med to me to be the weak point, not in the
fundamental principles of uniformitarianism, but in
uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It lay, to my
mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a less degree by
Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded
by the stratified rocks. I said: "This attempt to
limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive
and deductive reasoning from the things which are to
the things which were--this faithlessness to its own
logic, seems to me to have cost uniformitarianism the
place as the permanent form of geological speculation
which it might otherwise have held" (_Lay Sermons_, p.
260). The context shows that "uniformitarianism" here
means that doctrine, as limited in application by
Hutton and Lyell, and that what I mean by
"evolutionism" is consistent and thorough-going
uniformitarianism.

[24] _Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_, vol. i. p. 670.
New edition, 1847.

[25] At Glasgow in 1856.

[26] _Optics_, query 31.

[27] The author recognises this in his _Explanations_.

IV: AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY

[1887]

If there is any truth in the old adage that a burnt child dreads the
fire, I ought to be very loath to touch a sermon, while the memory of
what befell me on a recent occasion, possibly not yet forgotten by the
readers of the _Nineteenth Century_, is uneffaced. But I suppose that
even the distinguished censor of that unheard-of audacity to which not
even the newspaper report of a sermon is sacred, can hardly regard a
man of science as either indelicate or presumptuous, if he ventures to
offer some comments upon three discourses, specially addressed to the
great assemblage of men of science which recently gathered at
Manchester, by three bishops of the State Church. On my return to
England not long ago, I found a pamphlet[28] containing a version,
which I presume to be authorised, of these sermons, among the huge
mass of letters and papers which had accumulated during two months'
absence; and I have read them not only with attentive interest, but
with a feeling of satisfaction which is quite new to me as a result of
hearing, or reading, sermons. These excellent discourses, in fact,
appear to me to signalise a new departure in the course adopted by
theology towards scie