The limitations implied in these passages appear to me to constitute the weakness and the logical defect of Uniformitarianism.  No one will impute blame to Hutton that, in face of the imperfect condition, in his day, of those physical sciences which furnish the keys to the riddles of geology, he should have thought it practical wisdom to limit his theory to an attempt to account for “the present order of things”; but I am at a loss to comprehend why, for all time, the geologist must be content to regard the oldest fossiliferous rocks as the ultima Thule of his science; or what there is inconsistent with the relations between the finite and the infinite mind, in the assumption, that we may discern somewhat of the beginning, or of the end, of this speck in space we call our earth.  The finite mind is certainly competent to trace out the development of the fowl within the egg; and I know not on what ground it should find more difficulty in unravelling the complexities Of the development of the earth.  In fact, as Kant has well remarked,[10] the cosmical process is really simpler than the biological.

[Footnote 10:  “Man darf es sich also nicht befremden lassen, wenn ich mich unterstehe zu sagen, dass eher die Bildung aller Himmelskoerper, die Ursache ihrer Bewegungen, kurz der Ursprung der gantzen gegenwaertigen Verfassung des Weltbaues werden koennen eingesehen werden, ehe die Erzeugung eines einzigen Krautes oder einer Raupe aus mechanischen Gruenden, deutlich und vollstaendig kund werden wird.”—­KANT’S Saemmtliche Werke, Bd. i. p. 220.]

This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things which are, to those which were—­ this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost Uniformitarianism the place, as the permanent form of geological speculation, which it might otherwise have held.

It remains that I should put before you what I understand to be the third phase of geological speculation—­namely, EVOLUTIONISM.

I shall not make what I have to say on this head clear, unless I diverge, or seem to diverge, for a while, from the direct path of my discourse, so far as to explain what I take to be the scope of geology itself.  I conceive geology to be the history of the earth, in precisely the same sense as biology is the history of living beings; and I trust you will not think that I am overpowered by the influence of a dominant pursuit if I say that I trace a close analogy between these two histories.

If I study a living being, under what heads does the knowledge I obtain fall?  I can learn its structure, or what we call its ANATOMY; and its DEVELOPMENT, or the series of changes which it passes through to acquire its complete structure.  Then I find that the living being has certain powers resulting from its own activities, and the interaction of these with the activities of other things—­the knowledge of which is PHYSIOLOGY.  Beyond this the living being has a position in space and time, which is its DISTRIBUTION.  All these form the body of ascertainable facts which constitute the status quo of the living creature.  But these facts have their causes; and the ascertainment of these causes is the doctrine of AETIOLOGY.