the globe one outside another.

It is true that early in the nineteenth century Sir Charles Lyell and
others tried to disclaim this absurd and unscientific inheritance from
Werner's onion-coats; but modern geology has never yet got rid of its
essential and its chief characteristic idea, for all our text-books
still speak of various successive ages _when only certain types of life
prevailed all over the globe_. Hence it is that Herbert Spencer
caustically remarks: "Though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its
spirit is traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the
conclusions of its antagonists."[36] Hence it is that Whewell, in his
"History of the Inductive Sciences," refuses to acknowledge that in
geology any real advance has yet been made toward a stable science like
those of astronomy, physics, and chemistry. "We hardly know," he says,
"whether the progress is begun. The history of physical astronomy almost
commences with Newton, and few persons will venture to assert that the
Newton of geology has yet appeared."[37] Hence it is that T.H. Huxley
declares, "In the present condition of our knowledge and of _our
methods_, one verdict,--'_not proven and not provable'--must be recorded
against all grand hypotheses of the palæontologist respecting the
general succession of life on the globe."[38] And hence it is that Sir
Henry H. Howorth, a member of the British House of Commons and the
author of three exhaustive works on the Glacial theory, declares, "It is
a singular and notable fact, that while most other branches of science
have emancipated themselves from the trammels of metaphysical reasoning,
_the science of geology still remains imprisoned in a priori_
theories."[39]

[Footnote 36: "Illustr. of Univ. Prog.," p. 343.]