ong. Hardly had contemporary
thought begun to adjust itself to the conception of past ages of
incomprehensible extent, each terminated by a catastrophe of the
Noachian type, when a man appeared who made the utterly bewildering
assertion that the geological record, instead of proving numerous
catastrophic revolutions in the earth's past history, gives no warrant
to the pretensions of any universal catastrophe whatever, near or
remote.

This iconoclast was Charles Lyell, the Scotchman, who was soon to be
famous as the greatest geologist of his time. As a young man he had
become imbued with the force of the Huttonian proposition, that present
causes are one with those that produced the past changes of the
globe, and he carried that idea to what he conceived to be its logical
conclusion. To his mind this excluded the thought of catastrophic
changes in either inorganic or organic worlds.

But to deny catastrophism was to suggest a revolution in current
thought. Needless to say, such revolution could not be effected without
a long contest. For a score of years the matter was argued pro and con.,
often with most unscientific ardor. A mere outline of the controversy
would fill a volume; yet the essential facts with which Lyell at last
established his proposition, in its bearings on the organic world, may
be epitomized in a few words. The evidence which seems to tell of past
revolutions is the apparently sudden change of fossils from one stratum
to another of the rocks. But Lyell showed that this change is not always
complete. Some species live on from one alleged epoch into the next. By
no means all the contemporaries of the mammoth are extinct, and numerous
marine forms vastly more ancient still have living representatives.

Moreover, the blanks between strata in any particular vertical series
are amply filled in with records in the form of thick strata in some
geographically distant series. For example, in some regions Silurian
rocks are directly overlaid by the coal measures; but elsewhere this
sudden break is filled in with the Devonian rocks that tell of a great
"age of fishes." So commonly are breaks in the strata in one region
filled up in another that we are forced to conclude that the
record shown by any single vertical series is of but local
significance--telling, perhaps, of a time when that particular sea-bed
oscillated above the water-line, and so ceased to receive sediment until
some future age when it had osci