HKB
the operation was sudden or gradual, insensible or paroxysmal. It must be shown that a slow process could never in any series of ages give rise to the same results.
The advocate of paroxysmal energy might assume a uniform and fixed rate of variation in times past and present for the animate world, that is to say, for the dying-out and coming-in of species, and then endeavor to prove that the changes of the inanimate world have not gone on in a corresponding ratio. But the adoption of such a standard of comparison would lead, I suspect, to a theory by no means favorable to the pristine intensity of natural causes. That the present state of the organic world is not stationary, can be fairly inferred from the fact, that some species are known to have become extinct in the course even of the last three centuries, and that the exterminating causes always in activity, both on the land and in the waters, are very numerous; also, because man himself is an extremely modern creation; and we may therefore reasonably suppose that some of the mammalia now contemporary with man, as well as a variety of species of inferior classes, may have been recently introduced into the earth, to supply the places of plants and animals which have from time to time disappeared. But granting that some such secular variation in the zoological and botanical worlds is going on, and is by no means wholly inappreciable to the naturalist, still it is certainly far less manifest than the revolution always in progress in the inorganic world. Every year some volcanic eruptions take place, and a rude estimate might be made of the number of cubic feet of lava and scoriae poured or cast out of various craters. The amount of mud and sand deposited in deltas, and the advance of new land upon the sea, or the annual retreat of wasting sea-cliffs, are changes the minimum amount of which might be roughly estimated. The quantity of land raised above or depressed below the level of the sea might also be computed, and the change arising from such movements in a century might be conjectured. Suppose the average rise of the land in some parts of Scandinavia to be as much as five feet in a hundred years, the present sea-coast might be uplifted 700 feet in fourteen thousand years; but we should have no reason to anticipate, from any zoological data hitherto acquired, that the molluscous fauna of the northern seas would in that lapse of years undergo any sensible amount of variation. We discover sea-beaches in Norway 700 feet high, in which the shells are identical with those now inhabiting the German Ocean; for the rise of land in Scandinavia, however insensible to the inhabitants, has evidently been rapid when compared to the rate of contemporaneous change in the testaceous fauna of the German Ocean. Were we to wait therefore until the mollusca shall have undergone as much fluctuation as they underwent between the period of the Lias and the Upper Oolite formations; or between the Oolite and Chalk, nay, even between any two of eight subdivisions of the Eocene series, what stupendous revolutions in physical geography ought we not to expect, and how many mountain-chains might not be produced by the repetition of shocks of moderate violence, or by movements not even perceptible by man!
Or, if we turn from the mollusca to the vegetable kingdom, and ask the botanist how many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions might be expected, and how much the relative level of land and sea might be altered, or how far the principal deltas will encroach upon the ocean, or the sea-cliffs recede from the present shores, before the species of European forest-trees will die out, he would reply that such alterations in the inanimate world might be multiplied indefinitely before he should have reason to anticipate, by reference to any known data, that the existing species of trees in our forests would disappear and give place to others. In a word, the movement of the inorganic world is obvious and palpable, and might be likened to the minute-hand of a clock, the progress of which can be seen and heard, whereas the fluctuations of the living creation are nearly invisible, and resemble the motion of the hour-hand of a timepiece. It is only by watching it attentively for some time, and comparing its relative position after an interval, that we can prove the reality of its motion.[255]