He undertook the task chiefly to educate, not them, but
himself, and if Sir Isaac Newton had, like Sir Charles Lyell,
asked him to explain for Americans his last edition of the
"Principia," Adams would have jumped at the chance. Unfortunately
the mere reading such works for amusement is quite a different
matter from studying them for criticism. Ignorance must always
begin at the beginning. Adams must inevitably have begun by
asking Sir Isaac for an intelligible reason why the apple fell to
the ground. He did not know enough to be satisfied with the fact.
The Law of Gravitation was so-and-so, but what was Gravitation?
and he would have been thrown quite off his base if Sir Isaac had
answered that he did not know.
At the very outset Adams struck on Sir Charles's Glacial Theory
or theories. He was ignorant enough to think that the glacial
epoch looked like a chasm between him and a uniformitarian world.
If the glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe? To
him the two or three labored guesses that Sir Charles suggested
or borrowed to explain glaciation were proof of nothing, and were
quite unsolid as support for so immense a superstructure as
geological uniformity. If one were at liberty to be as lax in
science as in theology, and to assume unity from the start, one
might better say so, as the Church did, and not invite attack by
appearing weak in evidence.
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