The sober historian has always had to contend against the traditional belief that 'there were giants on the earth in those days!' The love of the marvellous has always led to the ascription of past events to the work of demigods who were not of like powers and passions with ourselves. Hence the invention of those 'catastrophies'--in which the reputations of deities as well as of men and women have often suffered. It is the same tendency in the human mind which makes it so difficult to conceive of all the changes in the earth's surface-features and its inhabitants being due to similar operations to those still going on around us. Lyell's views have constantly been misrepresented by the belief being ascribed to him that 'the forces operating on the globe have never acted with greater intensity than at the present day.' But his real position in this matter was a frankly 'agnostic' one. 'Bring me evidence,' he would have said, 'that changes have taken place on the globe, which cannot be accounted for by agencies still at work _when operating through sufficiently long periods of time_, and I will abandon my position.' But such evidence was not forthcoming in his day, and I do not think has ever been discovered since. Professor Sollas has very justly said, 'Geology has no need to return to the catastrophism of its youth; in becoming evolutional it does not cease to remain essentially uniformitarian[149].' Alfred Russel Wallace, who has always been as stout a defender of the views of Lyell as he has of those of Darwin, has given me his permission to quote from a letter he wrote me in 1888. After referring to what he regards as the weak and mistaken attacks on Lyell's teachings, 'which have of late years been so general among geologists,' he says:-- 'I have always been surprised when men have advanced the view that volcanic action _must_ have been greater when the earth was hotter, and entirely ignore the numerous indications that both subterranean and meteorological forces, even in Palaeozoic times, were of the same order of magnitude as they are now--and this I have always believed is what Lyell's teaching implies.' I believe that Mr Wallace's expression, adopted from the mathematicians, 'the same order of magnitude,' would have met with Lyell's complete acquiescence. He was not so unwise as to suppose that, in the limited periods of human history, we must necessarily have had experience--even at Krakatoa or 'Skaptar Jokull'--of nature's greatest possible convulsions, but he fought tenaciously against any admission of 'cataclysms' that would belong to a totally different category to those of the present day.