“Catastrophe” is a relative conception.  For ourselves it means an event which brings about very terrible consequences to man, or impresses his mind by its magnitude relatively to him.  But events which are quite in the natural order of things to us, may be frightful catastrophes to other sentient beings.  Surely no interruption of the order of nature is involved if, in the course of descending through an Alpine pine-wood, I jump upon an anthill and in a moment wreck a whole city and destroy a hundred thousand of its inhabitants.  To the ants the catastrophe is worse than the earthquake of Lisbon.  To me it is the natural and necessary consequence of the laws of matter in motion.  A redistribution of energy has taken place, which is perfectly in accordance with natural order, however unpleasant its effects may be to the ants.

Imagination, inspired by scientific reason, and not merely assuming the airs thereof, as it unfortunately too often does in the pulpit, so far from having any right to repudiate catastrophes and deny the possibility of the cessation of motion and life, easily finds justification for the exactly contrary course.  Kant in his famous “Theory of the Heavens” declares the end of the world and its reduction to a formless condition to be a necessary consequence of the causes to which it owes its origin and continuance.  And, as to catastrophes of prodigious magnitude and frequent occurrence, they were the favourite asylum ignorantiae of geologists, not a quarter of a century ago.  If modern geology is becoming more and more disinclined to call in catastrophes to its aid, it is not because of any a priori difficulty in reconciling the occurrence of such events with the universality of order, but because the a posteriori evidence of the occurrence of events of this character in past times has more or less completely broken down.

It is, to say the least, highly probable that this earth is a mass of extremely hot matter, invested by a cooled crust, through which the hot interior still continues to cool, though with extreme slowness.  It is no less probable that the faults and dislocations, the foldings and fractures, everywhere visible in the stratified crust, its large and slow movements through miles of elevation and depression, and its small and rapid movements which give rise to the innumerable perceived and unperceived earthquakes which are constantly occurring, are due to the shrinkage of the crust on its cooling and contracting nucleus.

Without going beyond the range of fair scientific analogy, conditions are easily conceivable which should render the loss of heat far more rapid than it is at present; and such an occurrence would be just as much in accordance with ascertained laws of nature, as the more rapid cooling of a red-hot bar, when it is thrust into cold water, than when it remains in the air.  But much more rapid cooling might entail a shifting and rearrangement of the parts of the crust