of the violent and sudden changes which constitute catastrophes, our thoughts naturally turn at first to great mechanical and physical effects; -- ruptures and displacements of strata; extensive submersions and emersions of land; rapid changes of temperature. But the catastrophes which we have to consider in geology affect the organic as well as the inorganic world. The sudden extinction of one collection of species, and the introduction of another in their place, is a catastrophe, even if unaccompanied by mechanical violence. Accordingly, the antagonism of the catastrophist and uniformitarian school has shown itself in this department of the subject, as well as in the other. When geologists had first discovered that the successive strata are each distinguished by appropriate organic fossils, they assumed at once that each of these collections of living things belonged to a separate creation. But this conclusion, as I have already said, Mr. Lyell has attempted to invalidate, by proving that in the existing order of things, some species become extinct; and by suggesting it as possible, that in the same order it may be true that new species are from time to time. produced, even in the present course of nature. And in this, as in the other part of the subject, he calls in the aid of vast periods of time, in order that the violence of the changes may be softened down and he appears disposed to believe that the actual extinction and creation of species may be so slow as to excite no more notice than it has hitherto obtained; and yet may be rapid enough, considering the immensity of geological periods, to produce such a succession of different collections of species as we find in the strata of the earth's surface.

7. Origin of the present Organic World.-The last great event in the history of the vegetable and animal kingdoms was that by which their various tribes were placed in their present seats. And we may form various

hypotheses with regard to the sudden or gradual manner in which we may suppose this distribution to have taken place. We may assume that at the beginning of the present order of things, a stock of each species was placed in the vegetable or animal province to which it belongs, by some cause out of the common order of nature; or we may take a uniformitarian view of the subject, and suppose that the provinces of the organic world derived their population from some anterior state of things by the operation of natural causes.

Nothing has been pointed out in the existing order of things which has any analogy or resemblance, of any valid kind, to that creative energy which must be exerted in the production of a new species. And to assume the introduction of new species as "a part of the order of nature," without pointing out any natural fact with which such an event can be classed, would be to reject creation, by an arbitrary act. Hence, even on natural grounds, the most intelligible view of the history of the animal and vegetable kingdoms seems to be, that each period which is marked by a distinct collection of species forms a cycle; and that at the beginning of each such cycle a creative power was exerted, of a kind to which there was nothing at all analogous in the succeeding part of the same cycle. If it be urged that in some cases the same species, or the same genus, runs through two geological formations, which must, on other grounds, be referred to different cycles of creative energy, we may reply that the creation of many new species does not imply the extinction of all the old ones.

Thus we are led by our reasonings to this view, that the present order of things was commenced by an act of creative power entirely different to any agency which has been exerted since. None of the influences which have modified the present races of animals and plants

since they were placed in their habitations on the earth's surface can have had any efficacy in producing them at first. We are necessarily driven to assume, as the beginning of the present cycle of organic nature, an event not included in the course of nature. And we may remark that this necessity is the more cogent, precisely because other cycles have preceded the present.

8. Nebular Origin of the Solar System.-If we attempt to apply the same antithesis of opinion (the doctrines of Catastrophe and Uniformity,) to the other subjects of palætiological sciences, we shall be led to similar conclusions. Thus, if we turn our attention to astronomical palætiology, we perceive that the nebular hypothesis has a uniformitarian tendency. According to this hypothesis the formation of this our system of sun, planets, and satellites, was a process of the same kind as those which are still going on in the heavens. One after another, nebulæ condense into separate masses, which begin to revolve about each other by mechanical necessity, and form systems of which our solar system is a finished example. But we may remark, that the uniformitarian doctrine on this subject rests on most unstable foundations. We have as yet only very vague and imperfect reasonings to show that by such condensation a material system such as ours could result; and the introduction of organized beings into such a material system is utterly out of the reach of our philosophy. Here again, therefore, we are led to regard the present order of the world as pointing towards an origin altogether of a different kind from anything which our material science can grasp.

9. Origin of Languages.-We may venture to say that we should be led to the same conclusion once more, if we were to take into our consideration those palætiological sciences which are beyond the domain of matter;

for instance, the history of languages. We may explain many of the differences and changes which we become acquainted with, by referring to the action of causes of change which still operate. But what glossologist will venture to declare that the efficacy of such causes has been uniform;-that the influences which mould a language, or make one language differ from others of the same stock, operated formerly with no more efficacy than they exercise now. "Where," as has elsewhere been asked, "do we now find a language in the process of formation, unfolding itself in inflexions, terminations, changes of vowels by grammatical relations, such as characterize the oldest known languages?" Again, as another proof how little the history of languages suggests to the philosophical glossologist the persuasion of a uniform action of the causes of change, I may refer to the conjecture of Dr. Prichard, that the varieties of language produced by the separation of one stock into several, have been greater and greater as we go backwards in history:-that the formation of sister dialects from a common language, (as the Scandinavian, German, and Saxon dialects from the Teutonic, or the Gaelic, Erse and Welsh from the Celtic,) belongs to the first millennium before the Christian era; while the formation of cognate languages of the same family, as the Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and Gothic, must be placed at least two thousand years before that era; and at a still earlier period took place the separation of the great families themselves, the Indo-European, Semitic, and others, in which it is now difficult to trace the features of a common origin. No hypothesis except one of this kind will explain the existence of the families, groups, and dialects of languages, which we find in existence. Yet this is an entirely different view from that which * Researches, 11. 224.

*

the hypothesis of the uniform progress of change would give. And thus, in the earliest stages of man's career, the revolutions of language must have been, even by the evidence of the theoretical history of language itself, of an order altogether different from any which have taken place within the recent history of man. And we may add, that as the early stages of the progress of language must have widely different from those later ones of which we can in some measure trace the natural causes, we cannot place the origin of language in any point of view in which it comes under the jurisdiction of natural causation at all.

10. No Natural Origin discoverable.-We are thus led by a survey of several of the palætiological sciences to a confirmation of the principle formerly asserted*, That in no palætiological science has man been able to arrive at a beginning which is homogeneous with the known course of events. We can in such sciences often go very far back;-determine many of the remote circumstances of the past series of events;-ascend to a point which seems to be near the origin;-and limit the hypotheses respecting the origin itself: but philosophers never have demonstrated, and, so far as we can judge, probably never will be able to demonstrate, what was that primitive state of things from which the progressive course of the world took its first departure. In all these paths of research, when we travel far backwards, the aspect of the earlier portions becomes very different from that of the advanced part on which we now stand; but in all cases the path is lost in obscurity as it is traced backwards towards its starting point: it becomes not only invisible, but unimaginable; it is not only an interruption, but an abyss, which interposes itself between us and any intelligible beginning of things.

*Hist. Ind. Sci., B. xvIII. c. vi. sect. 5.