I owe more than I can tell to the careful study of the _Principles of Geology_ in my young days; and, long before the year 1856, my mind was familiar with the truth that "the doctrine of uniformity is not incompatible with great and sudden changes," which, as I have shown, is taught _totidem verbis_ in that work. Even had it been possible for me to shut my eyes to the sense of what I had read in the _Principles_, Whewell's _Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_, published in 1840, a work with which I was also tolerably familiar, must have opened them. For the always acute, if not always profound, author, in arguing against Lyell's uniformitarianism, expressly points out that it does not in any way contravene the occurrence of catastrophes. With regard to such occurrences [earthquakes, deluges, etc.], terrible as they appear at the time, they may not much affect the {276} average rate of change: there may be a _cycle_, though an irregular one, of rapid and slow change: and if such cycles go on succeeding each other, we may still call the order of nature uniform, notwithstanding the periods of violence which it involves.[72] The reader who has followed me through this brief chapter of the history of geological philosophy will probably find the following passage in the paper of the Duke of Argyll to be not a little remarkable:-- Many years ago, when I had the honour of being President of the British Association,[73] I ventured to point out, in the presence and in the hearing of that most distinguished man [Sir C. Lyell] that the doctrine of uniformity was not incompatible with great and sudden changes, since cycles of these and other cycles of comparative rest might well be constituent parts of that uniformity which he asserted. Lyell did not object to this extended interpretation of his own doctrine, and indeed expressed to me his entire concurrence. I should think he did; for, as I have shown, there was nothing in it that Lyell himself had not said, six-and-twenty years before, and enforced, three years before; and it is almost verbally identical with the view of uniformitarianism taken by Whewell, sixteen years before, in a work with which, one would think, that any one who undertakes to discuss the philosophy of science should be familiar. Thirty years have elapsed since the beginner of 1856 persuaded himself that he enlightened the foremost geologist of his time, and one of the most acute and far-seeing men of science of any time, as to the scope of the doctrines which the veteran philosopher {277} had grown gray in promulgating; and the Duke of Argyll's acquaintance with the literature of geology has not, even now, become sufficiently profound to dissipate that pleasant delusion.