of to-day with the batteries of a new
generalization?

IV. THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN GEOLOGY

JAMES HUTTON

One might naturally suppose that the science of the earth which lies at
man's feet would at least have kept pace with the science of the distant
stars. But perhaps the very obviousness of the phenomena delayed the
study of the crust of the earth. It is the unattainable that allures and
mystifies and enchants the developing mind. The proverbial child spurns
its toys and cries for the moon.

So in those closing days of the eighteenth century, when astronomers had
gone so far towards explaining the mysteries of the distant portions
of the universe, we find a chaos of opinion regarding the structure
and formation of the earth. Guesses were not wanting to explain the
formation of the world, it is true, but, with one or two exceptions,
these are bizarre indeed. One theory supposed the earth to have been at
first a solid mass of ice, which became animated only after a comet had
dashed against it. Other theories conceived the original globe as a mass
of water, over which floated vapors containing the solid elements, which
in due time were precipitated as a crust upon the waters. In a word, the
various schemes supposed the original mass to have been ice, or water,
or a conglomerate of water and solids, according to the random fancies
of the theorists; and the final separation into land and water was
conceived to have taken place in all the ways which fancy, quite
unchecked by any tenable data, could invent.

Whatever important changes in the general character of the surface of
the globe were conceived to have taken place since its creation were
generally associated with the Mosaic: deluge, and the theories which
attempted to explain this catastrophe were quite on a par with
those which dealt with a remoter period of the earth's history. Some
speculators, holding that the interior of the globe is a great abyss
of waters, conceived that the crust had dropped into this chasm and had
thus been inundated. Others held that the earth had originally revolved
on a vertical axis, and that the sudden change to its present position
bad caused the catastrophic shifting of its oceans. But perhaps the
favorite theory was that which supposed a comet to have wandered near
the earth, and in whirling about it to have carried the waters, through
gravitation, in a vast tide over the continents.

Thus blindly groped t