perhaps a not inappropriate subject on which to address geologists upon a somewhat international occasion like this present meeting of the British Association at Dover, the question of Geological Time. In offering a brief history of the discussion, I gladly avail myself of the opportunity of enforcing one of the lessons which the controversy has impressed upon my own mind, and to point a moral which, as it seems to me, we geologists may take home to ourselves from a consideration of the whole question. There is, I think, a practical outcome which may be made to issue from the dispute in a combination of sympathy and co-operation among geologists all over the world. A lasting service will be rendered to our science if by well-concerted effort we can place geological dynamics and geological chronology on a broader and firmer basis of actual experiment and measurement than has yet been laid. To understand aright the origin and progress of the dispute regarding the value of time in geological speculation, we must take note of the attitude maintained towards this subject by some of the early fathers of the science. Among these pioneers none has left his mark more deeply graven on the foundations of modern geology than James Hutton. To him, more than to any other writer of his day, do we owe the doctrine of the high antiquity of our globe. No one before him had ever seen so clearly the abundant and impressive proofs of this remote antiquity recorded in the rocks of the earth's crust. In these rocks he traced the operation of the same slow and quiet processes which he observed to be at work at present in gradually transforming the face of the existing continents. When he stood face to face with the proofs of decay among the mountains, there seems to have arisen uppermost in his mind the thought of the immense succession of ages which these proofs revealed to him. His observant eye enabled him to see 'the operations of the surface wasting the solid body of the globe, and to read the unmeasurable course of time that must have flowed during those amazing operations, which the vulgar do not see, and which the learned seem to see without wonder.'[72] In contemplating the stupendous results achieved by such apparently feeble forces, Hutton felt that one great objection he had to contend with in the reception of his theory, even by the scientific men of his day, lay in the inability or unwillingness of the human mind to admit such large demands as he made on the past. 'What more can we require?' he asks in summing up his conclusions; and he answers the question in these memorable words: 'What more can we require? Nothing but time. It is not any part of the process that will be disputed; but after allowing all the parts, the whole will be denied; and for what?--only because we are not disposed to allow that quantity of time which the ablution of so much wasted mountain might require.'[73]