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Show 160. before men arrived, then men could not listen to the words of God as they came from Nature, but would have to trust the Bible. Lyell had heard too much about the Flood. In Principles of Geology, Lyell wrote the manifesto for the nineteenth century field geologist, arguing that the geological agents which had made the earth were still at work. He attacked the earlier theory of geology which believed that the earth in the present was in a period of "repose;" he insisted that this dogma was "calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity." Men who did not believe that the earth continued to change would despond, and cease to investigate "those minute but incessant mutations which every part of the earth's surface is undergoing." It was the geologist's job not to "speculate on the possibilities of the past, [but to] patiently explore the realities of the present." Agassiz was Lyell's heir, but his Etudes introduced the glacier, which seemed to be a much more violent and inconstant force than the better known agents of wind and water. Though this too offered an alternative to the deluge which had swept Noah's neighbors away, the introduction of such a massive geological agent seemed to require a revision of uniformity. The American historian Henry Adams wondered whether the glacier was not an heretical element if added to Lyell's theory, "obliging him to allow that causes had in fact existed on earth capable of producing more violent geological changes than would be possible in our own day." To Adams' doubt, Agassiz and Muir would reply that one needed only to go north |