Time and Life | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by Amy E. Zelmer.

TIME AND LIFE* MR. DARWIN'S "ORIGIN OF SPECIES"
by Thomas H. Huxley

[footnote] *"Macmillan's Magazine", December 1859.
EVERYONE knows that that superficial film of the earth's substance,
hardly ten miles thick, which is accessible to human investigation, is
composed for the most part of beds or strata of stone, the consolidated
muds and sands of former seas and lakes, which have been deposited
one upon the other, and hence are the older the deeper they lie. These
multitudinous strata present such resemblances and differences among
themselves that they are capable of classification into groups or
formations, and these formations again are brigaded together into still
larger assemblages, called by the older geologists, primary, secondary,
and tertiary; by the moderns, palaeozoic, mesozoic, and cainozoic: the
basis of the former nomenclature being the relative age of the groups of
strata; that of the latter, the kinds of living forms contained in them.
Though but a film if compared with the total diameter of our planet, the
total series of formations is vast indeed when measured by any human
standard, and, as all action implies time, so are we compelled to regard
these mineral masses as a measure of the time which has elapsed during
their accumulation. The amount of the time which they represent is, of
course, in the inverse proportion of the intensity of the forces which
have been in operation. If, in the ancient world, mud and sand
accumulated on sea-bottoms at tenfold their present rate, it is clear that
a bed of mud or sand ten feet thick would have been formed then in the
same time as a stratum of similar materials one foot thick would be
formed now, and 'vice versa'.
At the outset of his studies, therefore, the physical geologist had to
choose between two hypotheses; either, throughout the ages which are
represented by the accumulated strata, and which we may call 'geologic
time', the forces of nature have operated with much same average
intensity as at present, and hence the lapse of time which they represent
must be something prodigious and inconceivable, or, in the primeval
epochs, the natural powers