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Updated: July 13, 2025
Buckland, however, after Agassiz had shown him evidence of former glacial action in his own Scotland, became a convert the more readily, perhaps, as it seemed to him to oppose the uniformitarian idea. Gradually others fell in line, and after the usual imbittered controversy and the inevitable full generation of probation, the idea of an ice age took its place among the accepted tenets of geology.
Nevertheless, all these irregular, and apparently lawless, catastrophes would be the result of an absolutely uniformitarian action; and we might have two schools of clock-theorists, one studying the hammer and the other the pendulum.
Indeed, the following passage of the preface, in which De Maillet is supposed to speak of the Indian philosopher Telliamed, his 'alter ego', might have been written by the most philosophical uniformitarian of the present day:
Now this form has never been expressly adopted by Professor Huxley; so far from it, in his lecture on this subject at the Royal Institution before referred to, he observes, "I can testify, from personal experience, it is possible to have a complete faith in the general doctrine of evolution, and yet to hesitate in accepting the Nebular, or the Uniformitarian, or the Darwinian hypotheses in all their integrity and fulness."
Present land surfaces have often been submerged beneath the sea. During the latest of these submergences icebergs deposited the bowlders now scattered here and there over the land. Nothing could be simpler or more clearly uniformitarian.
Partly because it was a psychological moment, from the fact that the uniformitarian geology of Lyell with its graded advance of existences from age to age seemed absolutely to demand some evolutionary explanation; partly because artificial selection was a familiar idea of proved value in selective breeding, and "natural selection" seemed an exact parallel carried on by nature in the direction of continual improvement; but perhaps more largely because the abstract idea of "natural selection" involved so many intricate separate concepts that for nearly a generation scarcely two naturalists in the world could state the whole problem of the theory exactly alike; on all these accounts the theory of natural selection, or of the "survival of the fittest," to use the phrase of Herbert Spencer, became in the latter decades of the nineteenth century well-nigh universal.
There must be no personal and unmotivated clemency or pardon in such scheme, for, according to the old saw, "Mercy but murders, pardoning those who kill"; nor on the other hand should there be the excessive disregard of personal adjustments, and the uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his highest triumph in the old sentence, "Kill all offenders and suspects, for God will know his own," should have no part nor lot here.
And inasmuch as, under these circumstances, there need be no limit to the propagation of animals and plants, it is clear that the consistent working-out of the uniformitarian idea might lead to the conception of the eternity of the world. Not that I mean to say that either Hutton or Lyell held this conception assuredly not; they would have been the first to repudiate it.
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