Читать книгу Essay on the Theory of the Earth - Georges baron Cuvier - Страница 22

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The pole of the earth moves in a circle around the pole of the ecliptic, and its axis is more or less inclined to the plane of the ecliptic; but these two motions, the causes of which are now ascertained, are much too limited for the production of effects like those whose magnitude we have just been stating. At any rate, their excessive slowness would render them altogether inadequate to account for catastrophes which, as we have shewn, must have been sudden.

The same reasoning applies to all other slow motions which have been conceived as causes of the revolutions in question, chosen doubtless in the hope that their existence could not be denied, because it might always be easy to hold out that their very slowness rendered them imperceptible. But whether they be true or not is of little importance, for they explain nothing, as no cause acting slowly could have produced sudden effects.

Admitting that there has been a gradual diminution of the waters; that the sea has transported solid matters in all directions; that the temperature of the globe is either diminishing or increasing;—none of these causes could have overturned our strata; enveloped in ice large animals, with their flesh and skin; laid dry marine testacea, the shells of which are, at the present day, as well preserved as if they had been drawn up alive from the sea; and, lastly, destroyed numerous species, and even entire genera.

These considerations have struck most naturalists; and among those who have endeavoured to explain the present state of the globe, hardly any one has attributed it entirely to the agency of slow causes, still less to causes operating under our eyes. The necessity to which they are thus reduced, of seeking for causes different from those which we see acting at the present day, is the very circumstance that has forced them to make so many extraordinary suppositions, and to lose themselves in so many erroneous and contradictory speculations, that the very name of their science, as I have elsewhere remarked, has long been a subject of ridicule to prejudiced persons, who have only looked to the systems which it has been the means of hatching, and have forgotten the extensive and important series of authentic facts which it has brought to light[14].