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Updated: June 7, 2025
But the latest and most advanced school of geological speculation does not exclude “Catastrophism,” and, therefore, will not deny the possibility of sudden and great changes by this method. Doubtless the antiquity of the human race is much greater than is usually assumed by those whose views of the past are still regulated by mediæval systems of chronology.
But if this be the real significance of the seemingly sudden change from stratum to stratum, then the whole case for catastrophism is hopelessly lost; for such breaks in the strata furnish the only suggestion geology can offer of sudden and catastrophic changes of wide extent. Let us see how Lyell elaborates these ideas, particularly with reference to the rotation of species.
Of course such a thought as this was hopelessly misplaced in a generation that doubted the existence of extinct species, and hardly less so in the generation that accepted catastrophism; but it had been kept alive by here and there an advocate like Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, and now the banishment of catastrophism opened the way for its more respectful consideration.
Still less is there any necessary antagonism between either of these doctrines and that of Evolution, which embraces all that is sound in both Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism, while it rejects the arbitrary assumptions of the one and the, as arbitrary, limitations of the other.
And the controversy waged over the age of the earth had not been more bitter, that over catastrophism not more acrimonious, than that which now raged over the question of the transmutation of species. The question had implications far beyond the bounds of paleontology, of course.
That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet it was needless to name. "I don't think it can go on without a smash," said the young man with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. "Old Boulnois may be squared or he may be square.
Still less is there any necessary antagonists between either of these doctrines and that of Evolution, which embraces all that is sound in both Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism, while it rejects the arbitrary assumptions of the one and the, as arbitrary, limitations of the other.
The vast authority of Cuvier was employed in support of the traditionally respectable hypotheses of special creation and of catastrophism; and the wild speculations of the "Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe" were held to be models of sound scientific thinking, while the really much more sober and philosophical hypotheses of the "Hydrogeologie" were scouted.
The apex of the triangle of dark-blue sky was growing brighter and bluer, but he did not realize as yet that this was because he was coming nearer to the lights of the great house and garden. He only felt that the atmosphere was growing more intense, there was in the sadness more violence and secrecy more he hesitated for the word, and then said it with a jerk of laughter Catastrophism.
But it is proper to remark that each of the latter has kept alive the tradition of precious truths. CATASTROPHISM has insisted upon the existence of a practically unlimited bank of force, on which the theorist might draw; and it has cherished the idea of the development of the earth from a state in which its form, and the forces which it exerted, were very different from those we now know.
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