Naturally a young man, altogether
ignorant, could not say this to Sir Charles Lyell or Sir Isaac
Newton; but he was forced to state Sir Charles's views, which he
thought weak as hypotheses and worthless as proofs. Sir Charles
himself seemed shy of them. Adams hinted his heresies in vain. At
last he resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of
inserting a sentence in the text, intended to provoke correction.
"The introduction [by Louis Agassiz] of this new geological agent
seemed at first sight inconsistent with Sir Charles's argument,
obliging him to allow that causes had in fact existed on the
earth capable of producing more violent geological changes than
would be possible in our own day." The hint produced no effect.
Sir Charles said not a word; he let the paragraph stand; and
Adams never knew whether the great Uniformitarian was strict or
lax in his uniformitarian creed; but he doubted.
Objections fatal to one mind are futile to another, and as far
as concerned the article, the matter ended there, although the
glacial epoch remained a misty region in the young man's
Darwinism. Had it been the only one, he would not have fretted
about it; but uniformity often worked queerly and sometimes did
not work as Natural Selection at all. Finding himself at a loss
for some single figure to illustrate the Law of Natural
Selection, Adams asked Sir Charles for the simplest case of
uniformity on record.
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