g higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore,
of our present inquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning--no
prospect of an end."

Altogether remarkable as this paper seems in the light of later
knowledge, neither friend nor foe deigned to notice it at the moment.
It was not published in book form until the last decade of the century,
when Hutton had lived with and worked over his theory for almost fifty
years. Then it caught the eye of the world. A school of followers
expounded the Huttonian doctrines; a rival school under Werner in
Germany opposed some details of the hypothesis, and the educated world
as a whole viewed the disputants askance. The very novelty of the new
views forbade their immediate acceptance. Bitter attacks were made upon
the "heresies," and that was meant to be a soberly tempered judgment
which in 1800 pronounced Hutton's theories "not only hostile to sacred
history, but equally hostile to the principles of probability, to the
results of the ablest observations on the mineral kingdom, and to the
dictates of rational philosophy." And all this because Hutton's theory
presupposed the earth to have been in existence more than six thousand
years.

Thus it appears that though the thoughts of men had widened, in those
closing days of the eighteenth century, to include the stars, they had
not as yet expanded to receive the most patent records that are written
everywhere on the surface of the earth. Before Hutton's views could be
accepted, his pivotal conception that time is long must be established
by convincing proofs. The evidence was being gathered by William Smith,
Cuvier, and other devotees of the budding science of paleontology in
the last days of the century, but their labors were not brought to
completion till a subsequent epoch.

NEPTUNISTS VERSUS PLUTONISTS

In the mean time, James Hutton's theory that continents wear away and
are replaced by volcanic upheaval gained comparatively few adherents.
Even the lucid Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory, which Playfair,
the pupil and friend of the great Scotchman, published in 1802, did not
at once prove convincing. The world had become enamoured of the rival
theory of Hutton's famous contemporary, Werner of Saxony--the theory
which taught that "in the beginning" all the solids of the earth's
present crust were dissolved in the heated waters of a universal sea.
Werner affirmed that all rocks, of whatever character, had been