Note 110 — Chapter VIII · The Two Antagonist Doctrines of Geology.

[2nd Ed.] [I have, in the text, quoted the fourth edition of Mr. Lyell’s Principles, in which he recommends “an earnest and patient endeavor to reconcile the former indications of change with the evidence of gradual mutation now in progress.” In the sixth edition, in that which is, I presume, the corresponding passage, although it is transferred from the fourth to the first Book (B. i. c. xiii. p. 325) he recommends, instead, “an earnest and patient inquiry how far geological appearances are reconcileable with the effect of changes now in progress.” But while Mr. Lyell has thus softened the advocate’s character in his language in this passage, the transposition which I have noticed appears to me to have an opposite tendency. For in the former edition, the causes now in action were first described in the second and third Books, and the great problem of Geology, stated in the first Book, was attempted to be solved in the fourth. But by incorporating this fourth Book with the first, and thus prefixing to the study of existing causes arguments against the belief of their geological insufficiency, there is an appearance as if the author wished his reader to be prepared by a previous pleading against the doctrine of catastrophes, before he went to the study of existing causes. The Doctrines of Catastrophes and of Uniformity, and the other leading questions of the Palætiological Sciences, are further discussed in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Book x.]