nce."[45]

I have spoken of Uniformitarianism as the doctrine of Hutton and of
Lyell. If I have quoted the older writer rather than the newer, it is
because his works are little known, and his claims on our veneration too
frequently forgotten, not because I desire to dim the fame of his
eminent successor. Few of the present generation of geologists have read
Playfair's "Illustrations," fewer still the original "Theory of the
Earth;" the more is the pity; but which of us has not thumbed every page
of the "Principles of Geology?" I think that he who writes fairly the
history of his own progress in geological thought, will not be able to
separate his debt to Hutton from his obligations to Lyell; and the
history of the progress of individual geologists is the history of
geology.

No one can doubt that the influence of uniformitarian views has been
enormous, and, in the main, most beneficial and favourable to the
progress of sound geology.

Nor can it be questioned that Uniformitarianism has even a stronger
title than Catastrophism to call itself the geological speculation of
Britain, or, if you will, British popular geology. For it is eminently a
British doctrine, and has even now made comparatively little progress
on the continent of Europe. Nevertheless it seems to me to be open to
serious criticism upon one of its aspects.

I have shown how unjust was the insinuation that Hutton denied a
beginning to the world. But it would not be unjust to say that he
persistently, in practice, shut his eyes to the existence of that prior
and different state of things which, in theory, he admitted; and, in
this aversion to look beyond the veil of stratified rocks, Lyell follows
him.

Hutton and Lyell alike agree in their indisposition to carry their
speculations a step beyond the period recorded in the most ancient
strata now open to observation in the crust of the earth. This is, for
Hutton, "the point in which we cannot see any farther;" while Lyell
tells us,--

"The astronomer may find good reasons for ascribing the earth's form to
the original fluidity of the mass, in times long antecedent to the first
introduction of living beings into the planet; but the geologist must be
content to regard the earliest monuments which it is his task to
interpret, as belonging to a period when the crust had already acquired
great solidity and thickness, probably as great as it now possesses, and
when volcanic rocks, not essentially differin