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Updated: June 8, 2025
This theory of special creation, moreover, excluded the current doctrine of uniformitarianism as night excludes day, though most thinkers of the time did not seem to be aware of the incompatibility of the two ideas. It may be doubted whether even Lyell himself fully realized it.
Such being the three phases of geological speculation, we are now in a position to inquire which of these it is that Sir William Thomson calls upon us to reform in the passages which I have cited. It is obviously Uniformitarianism which the distinguished physicist takes to be the representative of geological speculation in general.
Applied within the limits of the time registered by the known fraction of the crust of the earth, I believe that uniformitarianism is unassailable.
No one can doubt that the influence of uniformitarian views has been enormous, and, in the main, most beneficial and favourable to the progress of sound geology. Nor can it be questioned that Uniformitarianism has even a stronger title than Catastrophism to call itself the geological speculation of Britain, or, if you will, British popular geology.
I do not suppose that, at the present day, any geologist would be found to maintain absolute Uniformitarianism, to deny that the rapidity of the rotation of the earth may be diminishing, that the sun may be waxing dim, or that the earth itself may be cooling.
There was a time when catastrophism might, pre-eminently, have claimed the title of "British popular geology"; and assuredly it has yet many adherents, and reckons among its supporters some of the most honoured members of this Society. By UNIFORMITARIANISM, I mean especially, the teaching of Hutton and of Lyell.
And yet while all these anomalous things went on, the same laws held sway that now are operative; and a true doctrine of uniformitarianism would make no unwonted concession in conceding them all though most of the imbittered geological controversies of the middle of the nineteenth century were due to the failure of both parties to realize that simple fact.
For the purposes of the present discourse I may take this last to be what is meant by "geological speculation." Now Uniformitarianism, as we have seen, tends to ignore geological speculation in this sense altogether. The one point the catastrophists and the uniformitarians agreed upon, when this Society was founded, was to ignore it.
Thus the discoveries made by the Challenger expedition, like all recent advances in our knowledge of the phenomena of biology, or of the changes now being effected in the structure of the surface of the earth, are in accordance with and lend strong support to, that doctrine of Uniformitarianism, which, fifty years ago, was held only by a small minority of English geologists Lyell, Scrope, and De la Beche but now, thanks to the long-continued labours of the first two, and mainly to those of Sir Charles Lyell, has gradually passed from the position of a heresy to that of catholic doctrine.
The limitations implied in these passages appear to me to constitute the weakness and the logical defect of Uniformitarianism.
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