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