Now, it will be found that those mistakes of the theologians to which I

refer have been exactly similar to that of the navigator in the supposed

case, and that they are mistakes which must be corrected on exactly the

same principle. The departments in which the mistakes have been made,

have, as in the false religious, been chiefly three,--the geographic,

astronomic, and geologic provinces. The geographic errors are of

comparatively ancient date. They belong mainly to the later patristic

and earlier middle ages, when the monk Cosmas, as the geographer of the

Church, represented the earth as a parallelogrammical plain, twice

longer than it was broad, deeply indented by the inland seas,--the

Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf,--and

encompassed by a rectangular trench occupied by the oceans. Some of my

audience will, however, remember that of the council of clergymen which

met in Salamanca in 1486 to examine and test the views of Christopher

Columbus, a considerable portion held it to be grossly heterodox to

believe that by sailing westwards the eastern parts of the world could

be reached. No one could entertain such a view without also believing

that there were antipodes, and that the world was round, not

flat,--errors denounced by not only great theologians of the golden age

of ecclesiastical learning, such as Lactantius and St. Augustine, but

also directly opposed, it was said, to the very letter of Scripture.

"They observed," says Washington Irving, in his "Life of Columbus,"

"that in the Psalms the heavens are said to be extended like a

hide,--that is, according to commentators, the curtain or covering of a

tent, which among the ancient pastoral nations was formed of the hides

of animals; and that St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, compares

the heavens to a tabernacle or tent extended over the earth, which they

thence inferred must be flat." In the sectional view of Cosmas the

heavens are represented as a semicircular vault or tent raised on

perpendicular walls; a vast mountain beyond the "Great Sea," lofty as

the innermost continent of the Buddhist cosmogony, rises immediately

under it; when the sun passed behind this mountain it was night, and

when it emerged from it, it was day. And certainly under the crystal box

of the monk it would be in vain to attempt, by passing westwards, to

arrive at the far east. The cosmogony of Cosmas was also that of the

doctors of Salamanca; and the views of Columbus were denounced as

heterodox because they failed to conform to it. Such was one of the

earlier mistakes of the theologians. When merely told regarding the

authorship of the chronometer, they held that they had been told also

respecting the mechanism of the chronometer. Attaching literal meanings

to what we now recognize as merely poetic or oratorical figures, they

believed that not only was it revealed to them that God had created the

heavens and earth, but also that he had created the earth in the form of

an extended plain, and placed a semi-globular heavens over it, just as

one places a semi-globular case of glass over a piece of flower-plot or

a miniature thicket of fern. And how, I ask, was this error ultimately

corrected? Simply by that science of the geographer which demonstrates

that the earth is not flat, but spherical, and that the heavens have not

edges, like a skin-tent or glass-case, to come anywhere in contact with

it, but consist mainly of a diffused atmosphere, with illimitable space

beyond.

[Illustration: Fig. 115.

THE HEAVENS AND EARTH OF COSMAS.[34]

(_Sectional View._)]

The second great error to which the theologians would fain have pledged

the truth of Scripture was an error in the astronomical province. I need

scarce refer to the often-adduced case of Galileo. The doctrine which

the philosopher had to "abjure, curse, and detest," and which he was

never again to teach, "because erroneous, heretical, and contrary to

Scripture," was the doctrine of the earth's motion and the sun's

stability. But to the part taken by our Protestant divines in the same

controversy,--men still regarded as authorities in their own proper

walk,--I must be allowed to refer, as less known, though not less

instructive, than that enacted by the Romish Church in the case of

Galileo. "This, we affirm, that is, that the earth rests, and the sun

moves daily around it," said Voetius, a great Dutch divine of the middle

of the seventeenth century, "with all divines, natural philosophers,

Jews and Mohammedans, Greeks and Latins, excepting one or two of the

ancients, and the modern followers of Copernicus." And we detect

Heideggeri, a Swiss theologian, who flourished about half an age later,

giving expression, a few years ere the commencement of the last century,

to a similar view, as the one taken by himself and many others, and as a

view "from which," he states, "our pious reverence for the Scriptures,

the word of truth, will not allow us to depart." A still more remarkable

instance occurs in Turrettine, whom we find in one of his writings

arguing in the strictly logical form, "in opposition to certain

philosophers," and in behalf of the old Ptolemaic doctrine that the sun

moves in the heavens and revolves round the earth, while the earth

itself remains at rest in the midst. "_First_," he remarks, "the sun is

said in Scripture to move in the heavens, and to rise and set. 'The sun

is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong

man to run a race.' 'The sun knoweth his going down.' 'The sun also

ariseth, and the sun goeth down.' _Secondly_, The sun by a miracle stood

still in the time of Joshua; and by a miracle it went back in the time

of Hezekiah. _Thirdly_, The earth is said to be fixed immovably. 'The

earth is also established that it cannot be moved.' 'Thou hast

established the earth, and it abideth.' 'They continue this day

according to their ordinance.' _Fourthly_, Neither could birds, which

often fly off through an hour's circuit, be able to return to their

nests. _Fifthly_, Whatever flies or is suspended in the air ought (by

this theory) to move from west to east; but this is proved not to be

true, from birds, arrows shot forth, atoms made manifest in the sun, and

down floating in the atmosphere." The theologian, after thus laying down

the law, sets himself to meet objections. If it be urged that the

Scriptures in natural things speak according to the common opinion,

Turrettine answers, "_First_, The Spirit of God best understands

natural things. _Secondly_, That in giving instruction in religion, he

meant these things should be used, not abused. _Thirdly_, That he is not

the author of any error. _Fourthly_, Neither is he to be corrected on

the pretence of our blind reason." If it be further urged, that birds,

the air, and all things are moved with the earth, he answers, "_First_,

That this is a mere fiction, since air is a fluid body; and _secondly_,

if so, by what force would birds be able to go from east to west?"

Now this I must regard as a passage as instructive as it is

extraordinary. Turrettine was one of the most accomplished theologians

of his age; nor is that age by any means a remote one. Tycho Brahe,

Kepler, and Galileo, had all finished their labors long ere he published

this passage; nay, at the time when his work issued from the Amsterdam

press (1695), Isaac Newton had attained his fifty-third year; and fully

ten years previous, Professor David Gregory, nephew of the inventor of

the Gregorian telescope, had begun to teach, from his chair in the

University of Edinburgh, the doctrine of gravitation and the true

mechanism of the heavens, as unfolded in the Newtonian philosophy. The

learned theologian, had he applied himself to astronomical science,

could have found at the time very enlightened teachers; but falling into

exactly the mistake of the sailor of my illustration, or that into

which, two centuries before, the doctors of Salamanca had fallen, he set

himself, instead, to contend with the astronomers, and, to the extent of

his influence, labored to pledge revelation to an astronomy as false as

that of the Buddhist, Hindu, or old Teuton. His mistake, I repeat, was

exactly that of the sailor. Though in the Scriptures only the fact of

the _authorship_ of the great chronometer set in the heavens "to be a

sign for seasons, and for days and years," is revealed, he regarded

himself as also informed respecting the principles on which the

chronometer was constructed, or at least respecting the true nature of

its movements; and several very important deductions may, I think, be

drawn from the carefully constructed passage in which he so unwittingly

records his error, and the grounds of it. In the first place, we may

safely hold that the texts of Scripture quoted by so able a theologian

are those which have most the appearance of being revelations to men

respecting the motions of the heavenly bodies. We may conclusively

infer, that if _they_ do not reveal the character of those motions, then

nowhere in Scripture is their character revealed. In the second place,

it is obvious that the cited texts do _not_ reveal the nature of the

motions. It would be as rational to hold that our best almanacs reveal

the Ptolemaic astronomy. In the scientific portion of our almanacs there

occur many phrases which are perfectly well understood, and indicate

very definitely what the writer really intends to express by them, that

yet, taken literally, are not scientifically true. The words, "Sun

rises," and "Sun sets," and "Moon rises," and "Moon sets," occur in

every page; there are two pages--those devoted to the months of March

and September--in which the phrase occurs, "Sun crosses the equinoctial

line;" and further, in the other pages, such phrases as "Sun enters

Aries," "Sun enters Taurus," "Sun enters Gemini," &c., &c., are not

unfrequent. The phrase, "new moon," is also of common occurrence. And

these phrases, interpreted after the manner of Turrettine, and according

to their strict grammatical meaning, would of course imply that the sun

has a motion round our planet,--that the moon moves round it every

twenty-four hours,--and that the earth is provided every month with a

new satellite. And yet we know that none of these ideas are in the mind

of the writer who, in compiling the almanac, employs the phrases. He

employs them to indicate, not the nature of the heavenly motions, but

the exact time when, from the several motions of the earth, the sun and

moon are brought into certain apparent positions with respect to either

the earth itself or to the celestial signs; or to indicate the time at

which the moon completes its monthly revolution, and presents a wholly

darkened disk to the earth. The commentator skilful enough to pledge the

almanac, in virtue of the literal meaning of the specified phrases, to

the old Ptolemaic hypothesis, would pledge it to a false science, which

its author never held. And such, evidently, has been the part enacted by

Turrettine and the elder theologians. The Scriptural phrases are in no

degree more express respecting the motion of the sun and the other

heavenly bodies than those of the almanac, which, we know, do not refer

to motion at all, but to time. Nor are we less justified in holding that

the cited Scriptures do not refer to _motion_, but to _authorship_. In

the third place, however, it is not by any mere reconsideration of the

adduced passages that the error, once made, is to be corrected. In a

purely astronomic question the appeal lies, not to Scripture, but to

astronomic science. And in the fourth place, the reasonings of

Turrettine, when, quitting his own proper walk, he discourses, not as a

theologian, but as a natural philosopher, are such as to read a lesson

not wholly unneeded in the present day. They show how in a department in

which it demanded the united life-long labors of a Kepler, Galileo, and

Newton to elicit the truth, the hasty guesses of a great theologian,

rashly ventured in a polemic spirit, gave form and body to but ludicrous

error. It is not after a fashion so impetuous and headlong that the

elaborately wrought key must be plied which unlocks the profound

mysteries of nature. But of this more anon.

Let me remark in the passing, that while Turrettine, one of the

greatest of theologians, failed, as we have seen, to find in Scripture

the fact of astronomic _construction_, La Place, one of the greatest of

the astronomers, failed in a manner equally signal to find in his

science the fact of astronomic _authorship_. The profound Frenchman

(whom Sir David Brewster well characterizes as "the philosopher to whom

posterity will probably assign the place next to Newton "), by

demonstrating that certain irregularities in the motion of the heavenly

bodies, which had been supposed to indicate a future termination to the

whole, were but mere oscillations, subject to periodic correction, and

indicative of no such termination in consequence, demonstrated also

that, from all that appears, the present astronomical movements might go

on forever. And as he could find in the solar system no indications of

an end, so was he unable, he said, to find in it any trace of a

beginning. He failed in discovering in all astronomy the fact of

authorship, just as Turrettine had failed in finding in all Scripture

the fact of astronomic construction. And here lies, I am inclined to

think, the true line between revelation and science,--a line drawn of

old with a God-derived precision, which can be rightly appreciated

neither by mere theologians like Turrettine, nor by mere men of science

like La Place, but which is notwithstanding fraught with an evidence

direct in its bearing on the truth of Scripture. That great fact, moral

in its influence, of the authorship of the heavens and earth, which the

science of La Place failed of itself to discover, and which was equally

unknown to the ancient philosophers, God has revealed. It is "through

faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the word of God, so

that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear."

And, on the other hand, the great truths, physical in their bearing, to

the discovery of which science is fully competent, God did not reveal,

but left them to be developed piecemeal by the unassisted human

faculties. And that ability of nicely drawing the line between the two

classes of truths in a very remote age of the world, which we find

manifested in the oldest of the Scriptural books, I must regard as an

ability which could have been derived only through inspiration, and from

God alone.

Let us, however, pursue our argument. Questions of geography, such as

those entertained by the theologians of Salamanca, must be tested, we

conclude, not by a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to

teach geography, but by the findings of geographic science. Questions in

astronomy, such as those which Turrettine and the opponents of Galileo

entertained, must be tried, we hold, not by a revelation never intended

to teach astronomy, but by the findings of astronomic science. But how

deal, I next ask, with the theologian who holds that geologic fact has

been revealed to him? Geology is as thoroughly a physical science as

either geography or astronomy. Its facts are equally capable of being

educed and established by the unassisted human intellect. It seems quite

as unlikely that it should have been made a special subject of

revelation, in its character as a science, as either of these sciences;

or that the line so nicely maintained with respect to _them_ should have

been transgressed with regard to _it_. In short, in order satisfactorily

to answer our query, it seems but necessary satisfactorily to answer

another, namely, What, in this special department, are truth and fact

scientifically ascertained?

There are, however, certain texts that appear to have a more direct

bearing on the successive periods of the geologist than any of those

that were once held to refer to the form of the earth, or to the nature

of the heavenly bodies, are now believed to have on geography or

astronomy. No one now holds that there is a geography revealed in

Scripture, or regards the cavils of the Salamanca doctors as other than

mere aberrations of the human mind. Nor, save mayhap in the darker

corners of the Greek and Romish Churches, are there men in the present

day who hold that there is a revealed astronomy. The texts so

confidently quoted by Turrettine, such as "The sun also ariseth and the

sun goeth down," are regarded in every Protestant Church as simply

tantamount, in their bearing on the question at issue, to the "Sun

rises" and "Sun sets" of the almanac. But while the Scriptures do not

reveal the form of the earth or the motions of the planets, they do

reveal the fact that the miracle of creation was effected, not by a

single act, but in several successive acts. And it is with the organisms

produced by successive acts of creation, and the formations deposited

during the periods in which these acts took place, that the geologist is

called on by his science to deal. And hence, while there are now no

attempts made to reconcile geographic or astronomic fact with the

Scripture passages which refer, in the language of the time, to the

glory of the heavens or the stability of the earth, just because it is

held that there is really nothing geographic or astronomic in the

passages to conflict with the geographic or astronomic facts, we still

seek to reconcile the facts of geologic science with what is termed the

Mosaic geology. We inquire whether, in its leading features, the Mosaic

does not correspond with the geologic record; and whether the _days_ of

the retrospective prophecy of creation are to be regarded as coextensive

with the vast periods of the geologist, or as merely representative

portions of them, or as literal days of twenty-four hours each? But

though we thus seek to harmonize the two records, we continue to regard

their grounds and objects as entirely different. The object of geology

is simply the elucidation of the history of the earth, and of the story

of its various creations; and its grounds are, like those of astronomy

or geography, or of any other physical science, facts and inferences

scientifically determined or deduced; while, on the other hand, the

grounds of the Mosaic record are those on which the other Scriptures

rest, and which have been so well laid down in what we may term the

higher literature of the "Evidences," while at least some of its

objects,--for who shall declare them all?--seem to be, first, to

establish the all-important fact of the Divine authorship of the

universe, and to show that all its various forces are not self-existent,

but owe their origin to a Great First Cause; next, to exhibit the

progressive character of God's workings,--a character which equally

applies to his works of creation and providence; and, in the third

place, to furnish a basis and precedent, in the Divine example, for that

institution of the Sabbath which bears not only a prophetic reference to

the great dynasty to come,--last of all the dynasties, and of which

re-created men are to be the happy subjects, and the Divine Man the

adorable Monarch,--but which has also been specially established in

order that right preparation may be made for the terminal state which it

symbolizes and foreshadows. Here, as certainly as in the other physical

sciences, the line has been drawn with perfect precision between what

man could and what he could not have known of himself. What he could

have known, and in part already knows, is geologic science; what in all

probability he never could have known is the fact of the Divine

authorship of the universe, and the true nature of the institution of

the Sabbath, as a time of preparation for the final state, and as alike

representative of God's workings in the past, and of his eternally

predetermined scheme for the future. "Is it not certain," Socrates is

represented as inquiring, in "the first Alcibiades," of his gay and

confident pupil, "that you know nothing but what has been told you by

others, or what you have found out for yourself?" There is at once

exquisite simplicity and great terseness in this natural division of the

only modes in which men can acquire knowledge; and we find it

wonderfully exemplified in all revelation. Scripture draws practically a

broad line between the two modes; and while it tells man all that is

necessary to his wants and welfare as a religious creature, it does not

communicate to him a single scientific fact which he is competent to

find out for himself.

About an age previous to the times of Turrettine, the danger of

"corrupting philosophy through an intermixed divinity" was admirably

shown by Bacon in his "Novum Organum;" and the line indicated was

exactly what we now find was laid down of old with such precision in

Scripture. "To deify error and to adore vain things," said the great

philosopher, "may be well accounted the plague of the understanding.

Some modern men, guilty of much levity, have so indulged this vanity,

that they have essayed to find natural philosophy in the first chapter

of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other places of holy writ, seeking the

living among the dead. Now this vanity is so much the more to be checked

and restrained, because, by unadvised mixture of Divine and human

things, not only a phantastical philosophy is produced, but also an

heretical religion. Therefore it is safe to give unto Faith, with a

sober mind, the things that are Faith's." The passage, partially quoted,

has been not unfrequently misapplied, as if it bore, not against

theologians such as Turrettine and the Franciscans, but against

theologians such as Chalmers, Dr. Bird Sumner, and Dr. Pye Smith,--not

against the men who derive a false science from Scripture, into which

God never introduced natural science of any kind, but against the men

who, having sought and acquired their science where it is alone to be

found, have striven to bring Scripture, in the misinterpreted passages,

into harmony with its findings. Taken, however, as a whole, its true

meaning is obvious. It is the men who have "essayed to find natural

philosophy" positively revealed in Genesis and the other sacred

books,--not the men who have merely shown that there is nothing in

Scripture which conflicts with the natural philosophy legitimately found

elsewhere,--that are obnoxious to the censure conveyed in the remark. It

is they only, and not the others, that are "_phantastical_" in their

philosophy and "_heretical_" in their religion. I say heretical in their

religion. The Ptolemaic doctrine which ascribed to the earth a central

place in the universe was only scientifically false, whereas the same

doctrine in Turrettine and the Franciscans, from the circumstance that

they pledged the Scripture to its falsity, and professed to derive it

direct from revelation, was not only scientifically false, but a heresy

to boot. And, in like manner, it is the class who term themselves the

"Mosaic geologists,"--men such as the Granville Penns, Moses Stewarts,

Eleazar Lords, Dean Cockburns, and Peter Macfarlanes,--who essay to

"find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis," and that too

a demonstrably false natural philosophy, who are obnoxious to the

Baconian censure now. No true geologist ever professes to deduce his

geology from Scripture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous

systems, always invariable in their order, and its successive groups of

fossil remains, always (in accordance with their place and age) of a

certain determinable character,--not in a revelation never intended by

its Divine Author to teach any natural science as such,--that he derives

the materials with which he builds. Had there been no Divine Revelation,

geology would be as certainly what it now is as either geography or

astronomy. That it comes in the present time more in contact with

revealed truth than either of these sciences, is, as I have shown,

merely a consequence of the fact that there is a history given in the

opening passages of Scripture, for far other than geological purposes,

of the authorship of the heavens and earth, and of the successive stages

of creation; and further, from the circumstance that, from various

motives, men are ever and anon inquiring how the geologic agrees with

the Scriptural record. It may be well here to remind the

anti-geologists, in connection with this part of my subject, of what at

the utmost they may hope to accomplish. Judging from all I have yet seen

of their writings, they seem to be as certainly impressed by the belief

that they are settling textually the geologic question of the world's

antiquity, as the doctors of Salamanca held that they were settling

textually the question of the world's form; or Turrettine and the

Franciscans, that they were settling textually the question of the

world's motion, or rather want of motion. But the mistake is quite as

gross in their case as in that of Turrettine and the doctors. Geology

rests on a broad, ever extending basis of evidence, wholly independent

of the revelation on which they profess, very unintelligently, in all

the instances I have yet known, to found their objections. What they

need at most promise themselves is, to defeat those attempts to

reconcile the two records which are made by geologists who respect and

believe the Scripture testimony,--not a very laudable feat, even could

it be accomplished, and certainly worthy of being made rather a subject

of condolence than of congratulation. And though, of course, men should

pursue the truth simply for its own sake, and independently either of

the consequences which it may be found to involve, or of the company

with which it may bring them acquainted, the anti-geologists might be

worse employed than in scanning the character and aims of the

associates with whom they virtually league themselves when they declare

war against the Christian geologist.

There are three different parties in the field, either directly opposed,

or at least little friendly, to the men who honestly attempt reconciling

the Mosaic with the geologic record. First, there are the

anti-geologists,--men who hold that geological questions are to be

settled now as the Franciscans contemporary with Galileo held that

astronomical questions were to be settled in the seventeenth century, or

as the doctors of Salamanca contemporary with Columbus held that

geographic questions were to be settled in the fifteenth. And _they_

believe that geology, as interpreted by the geologists, is entirely

false, because, as they think, irreconcilable with Scripture; further,

that our planet had no existence some seven or eight thousand years

ago,--that the apparent antiquity of the various sedimentary systems and

organic groups of the earth's crust is wholly illusive,--and that the

very oldest of them cannot be more than a few days older than the human

period. In fine, just as it was held two centuries ago by Turrettine and

the Franciscans, that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ was the only

legitimate authority in astronomic questions, so this class now hold

that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ is the only legitimate authority

in geologic questions; and further, that the Bible being, as they

contend, wholly opposed to the deductions of the geologist, these

deductions must of necessity be erroneous. Next, there is a class, more

largely represented in society than in literature, who, looking at the

general bearings of the question, the character and standing of the

geologists, and the sublime nature of their discoveries, believe that

geology ranks as certainly among the sciences as astronomy itself; but

who, little in earnest in their religion, are quite ready enough, when

they find theologians asserting the irreconcilability of the geologic

doctrines with those of Scripture, to believe them; nay, not only so,

but to repeat the assertion. It is not fashionable in the present age

openly to avow infidelity, save mayhap in some modified rationalistic or

pantheistic form; but in no age did the thing itself exist more

extensively; and the number of individuals is very great who, while they

profess an outward respect for revelation, have no serious quarrel with

the class who, in their blind zeal in its behalf, are in reality

undermining its foundations. Nor are there avowed infidels awanting who

also make common cause with the party so far as to assert that the

results of geologic discovery conflict irreconcilably with the Mosaic

account of creation. But there is yet another class, composed of

respectable and able men, who, from the natural influence of their

acquirements and talents, are perhaps more dangerous allies still, and

whom we find represented by writers such as Mr. Babbage and the Rev.

Baden Powell. It is held by both these accomplished men, that it is in

vain to attempt reconciling the Mosaic writings with the geologic

discoveries: both are intimately acquainted with the evidence adduced by

the geologist, and entertain no doubt whatever regarding what it

establishes; but though in the main friendly to at least the moral

sanctions of the New Testament, both virtually set aside the Mosaic

cosmogony; the one (Mr. Babbage) on the professed grounds that we really

cannot arrive with any certainty at the meaning of that old Hebrew

introduction to the Scriptures in which the genesis of things is

described; and the other (Mr. Powell) on the assumption that that

introduction is but a mere picturesque myth or parable, as little

scientifically true as the parables of our Saviour or of Nathan the seer

are historically so. Now, I cannot think that the anti-geologists are

quite in the place in which they either ought or intend to be when

engaged virtually in making common cause with either of these latter

classes.[35]

Be this as it may, however, it may be not uninstructive, and perhaps not

wholly unamusing, to examine what the claims really are of some of our

later anti-geologists to be recognized as the legitimate and qualified

censors of geologic fact or inference. It will be seen, that in the

passage which I have quoted from Turrettine, the theologian, in three of

his five divisions, restricts himself to the theologic province, and

that when in his own proper sphere even his errors are respectable; but

that in the two concluding divisions he passes into the province of the

natural philosopher, and that there his respectability ceases for the

time, and he becomes eminently ridiculous. The anti-geologists,--men of

considerably smaller calibre than the massive Dutch divine of the

seventeenth century,--also enter into a field not their own. Passing

from the theologic province, they obtrude into that of the geologist,

and settle against him, apparently after a few minutes' consideration,

or as mere special pleaders, questions on which he has been

concentrating the patient study and directing the laborious explorations

of years. And an exhibition by specimen of the nonsense to which they

have in this way committed themselves in their haste, may not be wholly

uninstructive. But I must defer the display till another evening. I

shall do them no injustice; but I trust it will be forgiven me should I

exhibit, as they have exhibited themselves, a class of writers to whose

assaults I have submitted for the last fourteen years without

provocation and without reply.

LECTURE TENTH.

THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS.

It has been well remarked, that that writer would be equally in danger

of error who would assign very abstruse motives for the conduct of great

bodies of men, or very obvious causes for the great phenomena of nature.

The motives of the masses,--on a level always with the average

comprehension,--are never abstruse; the causes of the phenomena, on the

other hand, are never obvious. And when these last are hastily sought

after, not from any devotion to scientific truth, or any genuine love of

it, but for some purpose of controversy, we may receive it as a sure and

certain fact that they will not be found. Some mere plausibility will be

produced instead, bearing on its front an obviousness favorable mayhap

to its reception for the time by the vulgar, but in reality fatal to its

claims in the estimate of all deep thinkers; while truth will meanwhile

lie concealed far below, in the bottom of her well, until patiently

solicited forth by some previously unthought of process, in the

character of some wholly unanticipated result. Such, in the history of

science, has been the course and character of error on the one hand, and

of actual discovery on the other: the error has been always

comparatively obvious,--the discovery unexpected and abstruse. And as

men descend in the scale of accomplishment or intellect, a nearer and

yet nearer approximation takes place between their conceptions of the

causes of the occult processes of nature, and the common and obvious

motives which influence large masses of their fellows; until at length

the sublime contrivances of the universe sink, in their interpretation

of them, into the clumsy expedients of a bungling mechanism.

Tested by their reading of the phenomena on this principle, we find

curious gradations between the higher and the humbler orders of minds.

The vortices of Descartes, for instance, involve but a simple idea, that

might have been struck out by almost any individual of a tolerably

lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding river, and seen

sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. But no fancy, however active,

or no reach of mere common sense, however respectable, could have

originated, or conducted to a successful conclusion, that profound

contemplation into which Newton fell in the garden of Woolsthorpe, when

he saw the loosened apple drop from the tree, and succeeded in

demonstrating that the planets are retained in their orbits by the same

law which impels a falling pebble towards the ground. So little obvious,

indeed, was the Newtonian scheme, that most of the contemporary

generation of philosophers,--some of them, such as Fontenelle and his

brother academicians of France, men of no mean standing,--died rejecting

it. And the objections of Turrettine to the motion of the earth on its

axis are, we find, still more obvious than even the idea of the

vortices. It does at first seem natural enough to suppose, that if the

earth's surface be speeding eastwards at the rate of several hundred

miles in the hour (a thousand miles at the equator), the birds which

flutter over it should be somewhat in danger of being left behind; and

that atoms and down flakes floating in the atmosphere in a time of calm,

instead of appearing, as they often do, either in a state of rest, or

moving with equal freedom in every direction, ought to be seen hurrying

westwards, as if puffed by the breath of a tornado. Such an objection

must for a time have appeared as just as it seems obvious, especially in

one's study on a Saturday night, with much of one's lecture still to

write, and the Sabbath too near to permit of verification or experiment.

Fontenelle, however, though he could not get over the difficulty of

conceiving how the same gravitation which made a stone fall also kept

the moon in its place, fairly surmounted that which puzzled Turrettine;

and in his "Plurality of Worlds,"--a publication of the same age as the

"Compendium Theologica,"--he makes his Marchioness surmount it too.

"'But I have a difficulty to solve,' he represents the lady as saying,

'and you must be serious. As the earth moves, the air changes every

moment; so we breathe the air of another country.' 'Not at all,' replied

I; 'for the air which encompasses the earth follows with us, and turns

with us. Have you not seen the labors of the silkworm? The shell or

cocoon which it weaves around itself with so much art is of a down very

loose and soft; and so the earth, which is solid, is covered, from the

surface twenty leagues upwards, with a kind of down, which is the air,

and, like the shell of the silkworm, turns along with it.'" Even

Turrettine, however, was as far in advance of some of our contemners of

science in the present day, as Fontenelle was in advance of Turrettine,

or Newton in advance of Fontenelle. The old theologian could scarce have

held, with a living ecclesiastic of the Romish Church in Ireland, Father

Cullen, that the sun is _possibly_ only a fathom in diameter; or have

asserted with a most Protestant lecturer who addressed an audience in

Edinburgh little more than three years ago, that, though God created all

the wild animals, it was the devil who made the flesh-eaters among them

fierce and carnivorous; and, of course, shortened their bowels,

lengthened their teeth, and stuck formidable claws into the points of

their digits.[36] Further, the error of Turrettine was but that of his

age, whereas our modern decriers of scientific fact and inference are

always men greatly in the rear of theirs, and as far inferior to the

ancient assertors of the same errors as the few untutored peasants and

fishermen of our own time, located in remote parts of the country, who

still retain the old faith in witchcraft, are inferior to the great

lawyers, poets, and divines,--the Fairfaxes, Henry Mores, Judge Haleses,

and Sir George Mackenzies,--who in the seventeenth century entertained a

similar belief. And so it may seem somewhat idle work to take any pains

in "scattering" such a "rear of darkness thin" as this forlorn phalanx

composes. "Let them alone," said a lunatic in the lucid fit, to a

soldier who had told him, when asked why he carried a sword, that it was

to kill his enemies,--"let them alone, and they will all die of

themselves." But though very inconsiderable, there is a comparatively

large proportion of the class perilously posted, on both sides of the

Atlantic, in what used to be termed of old in Scotland "the chair of

verity;" and there they sometimes succeed in doing harm, all

unwittingly, not to the science which they oppose, but to the religion

which they profess to defend. I was not a little struck lately by

finding in a religious periodical of the United States, a worthy

Episcopalian clergyman bitterly complaining, that whenever his sense of

duty led him to denounce from his pulpit the gross infidelity of modern

geology, he could see an unbelieving grin rising on the faces of not a

few of his congregation. Alas! who can doubt that such ecclesiastics as

this good clergyman must virtually be powerful preachers on the

skeptical side, to all among their people who, with intelligence enough

to appreciate the geologic evidence, are still unsettled in their minds

respecting that of the Christian faith. And so on this consideration

alone it may be found not uninstructive to devote the address of the

present evening to an exposure of the errors and nonsense of our modern

anti-geologists,--the true successors and representatives, in the

passing age, of the Franciscan and Salamanca doctors of the fifteenth

and seventeenth centuries.

Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be original simply by

being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, as certainly as in opinion

of a more solid kind, which ever and anon brings back the delusions and

errors of an earlier time: the follies of the present day are

transcripts, unwittingly produced, and with of course a few variations,

of follies which existed centuries ago; and it seems to be on this

principle,--a consequence, mayhap, of the limited range of the human

mind, not only in its elucidations of truth, but also in its forms of

error,--that scarce an explanation of geologic phenomena has been given

by the anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated by

writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was held, for

instance,--in opposition to the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, who

flourished early in the sixteenth century, and was one of the first who,

after the revival of learning, asserted the true character of organic

remains,--that fossils were formed in the rocks through the planetary

influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had never entered

into the composition of living creatures or plants. And this view

obtained very generally till about the middle of the seventeenth

century, when, save for a brief space long after, in the times of

Voltaire, it ceased to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously

enough, however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant

anti-geologists,--a clergyman of the English Church,--only three years

ago, in a publication written, he says, to counteract "the immense

mischief occasioned by the infidel works of geologists, _especially

among the lower classes_," and which he has termed "a brief and complete

refutation" of their "anti-scriptural theory."[37] "Fossils," says this

courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated structures:" some of

them were in all probability "formed of stone from the very first;"

others, of inanimate flesh and bone. "The mammoth found under the ice in

arctic regions had not necessarily been a living creature: it was

created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar form of

preservation, instead of being transmuted into stone, like the rest of

its class." Such was the state of keeping of this famous mammoth, when

discovered a little ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I

had occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its flesh; and

its bones, and part of its skin, covered with long red hair, are now in

the museum of Petersburg. But there is no evidence whatever, according

to this writer, that it had ever been a living creature: it was simply a

created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or archetypes,

fashioned during the first day in the depths of chaos, to typify or

foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into

existence a few days later. "What," he asks, "do the cocoa-nuts, melons,

and gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but that the

vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as well as the animal?"

Nay, further, the geologist has but got into the apartment in which the

original architect stored up his plans and models,--many of them,

however, rejected ones. For "though every animal is formed after his

archetype," we find him saying, "the converse is not true, that every

chaotic structure is represented by its living _facsimile_." But they

typify, if not living organisms, much more important things,--"they

represent," says our writer, "the land of the shadow of death;" and the

strata containing them, which geologists have opened, are symbolical of

the "gates of death." "The state of preservation in which most fossils

are, instead of having mouldered away, foreshadows immortality. The

gradation, too, from the organisms whose types are _said to be_ lost or

destroyed, and confused in innumerable heaps, up to the perfect and

complete specimen, is no fanciful representation of the resurrection;

while the isolated bones and parts of skeletons which, though found far

apart, as they were created, have been fitted together by the skill of

the accomplished anatomist, give assurance of the fact that our

scattered dust--our _membra disjecta_--shall come together at the sound

of the last trump." And this is "geology on Scripture principles,"

soberly expounded by a man who respects facts, while he gives no place

to fancy.

The "English clergyman" then goes on to show in his pamphlet, that the

Coal Measures furnish no evidence of the earth's antiquity. They were

formed, he says, by the finger of the Creator, "immediately and at once.

A carboniferous tree of gigantic size has been discovered," he adds, "in

the interior of the earth, of such a shape as entirely to prove the

absurdity of a theory [that of the earth's antiquity] which has not a

single valid argument to support it. It is described as having its trunk

rising from the earth perpendicularly ten feet, and then bending over

and extending horizontally sixty feet. Now, what living tree thus

lopsided could support such a weight in such a direction? It seems to

have been _created on purpose to silence the_ HORRID BLASPHEMIES _of

geologists_; for it proves to a demonstration, that the upper, nether,

and surrounding matter came into existence with it at the same instant;

for how else could it have been preserved in such a position?" The

triumph secured by the carboniferous tree, however,--though it does not

seem wholly impossible that a tree might in any age of the world have

been broken over some ten feet from its root, and bent in a horizontal

position,--seems in some danger of being neutralized, as we read on, by

the circumstance that geologists find not unfrequently, among their

fossils, the dung of the carnivorous vertebrates, charged in many

instances with the teeth, bones, and scales of the creatures on which

they had preyed, and strongly impressed, in at least the coprolites of

the larger Palæozoic ganoids, and of the enaliosaurs of the Secondary

period, by the screw-like markings of a spiral intestine, similar in

form to that now exemplified by the sharks and rays. And in maintaining

his hypothesis that most fossils are mere archetypes--mere plans or

models--of existences to be, the archetypal dung proves rather a

stumbling-block, and the English clergyman waxes exceedingly wroth

against the geologists. "We cannot," he says, "believe in such things

as coprolites. They are only a curious form of matter commanded by Him

who has made the flower to assume all shapes as well as all hues. He who

would not allow so much as a tool to be lifted up on the stones that

composed his altar, would certainly not allow the _work_ of animals to

compose his creation, much less, then, their dung. The geological

assertion that the Creator of this world formed it in some parts of

coprolites savors very much of Satan or Beelzebub, the god of dung.

Geologists could scarcely have made a more unfortunate self-refuting

assertion than this." I question, however, whether the clergyman does

well to be angry with the geologists here. That fossils are mere models

and archetypes, is _his_ hypothesis, not theirs; and so it is he himself

who is answerable, not they, for what he deems the impiety of the

archetypal dung. His next statement is of a kind suited somewhat to

astonish the practical geologist. "_It is the constant language of

geologists_," he says, in giving the result of their discoveries, "_that

no young have been found!!!_ while the larger fossils have been detected

isolated, or in the company of others, all differing in kind."

"Archetypal resemblances of ova have been found, and such things as

_moths_; but these are distinct and perfect in their kind. The

occurrence of the young, which are imperfect, is a fact which has not

been, and never can be, established; _therefore it never can be proved

that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years_." It

is "the constant language of geologists" that "no young have been found"

in the fossil state. Amazing assertion! "Therefore it never can be

proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand

years." Astonishing inference! There is not a tyro in geology who ever

looked over a set of fossils, or ever spent an hour in exploring a

fossiliferous deposit, who does not know that the remains of organisms

in every stage of growth may be found lying side by side in the same

bed,--that almost every museum contains its series of molluscs,

crustaceans, fishes, and corals, formed to illustrate species in their

various stages of growth,--that, in especial, among the ammonites of the

Secondary ages, and the trilobites of the Palæozoic ones, these series

have been made with great care, in order to prevent the erroneous

multiplication of species,--and that, in short, every richly

fossiliferous stratum in the earth's crust repeats the lesson so often

deduced from our churchyards, where graves of all sizes, from that of

the infant of a day to that of the aged adult, may be found lying side

by side. What the English clergyman represents as "the constant language

of geologists," is a language which _no_ geologist ever yet used, or

ever will. And his inference is in every way worthy of his premises. The

flourish with which he concludes his pamphlet would be infinitely

amusing had his language been just a little less solemn. "The writer of

the above remarks has felt it his duty," we find him saying, "to publish

them, not only to refute the arguments of the vain and puffed-lip

geologist, who fancies himself wiser than God, but also to prevent, by

God's blessing, the evil that must ensue from tampering with the sacred

text. And now, what has Satan to say? Why, THE TABLES ARE TURNED. Let

men beware. Why did not the British Association, at their twenty-third

meeting, in September, 1853, acknowledge their error as a body, in

applauding so loudly the assertion of one of their geological members at

a previous meeting, that this earth existed ages before man? They may

now have the satisfaction of thinking that, in spite of themselves,

those impious plaudits have been turned by the wrath of God into

hisses." Strange as the fact may seem, this passage was written, not in

grave joke, but in serious earnest.

The belief that fossil remains had never entered into the composition

of living organisms, but had been formed in the rocks just as we find

them, gradually gave place, during the seventeenth century, to the

belief that they were the debris of the Noachian Deluge, and evidences,

as they occurred in almost every known country, and were found on the

top of lofty hills, of at once its universality and the height to which

its waters had prevailed. And this hypothesis, like the others, has been

reproduced by some of the anti-geologists of the present day. The known

fact,--a result of modern science,--that the several formations (always

invariable in their order of succession) have their groups of organisms

peculiar to themselves, has, however, interposed a difficulty from which

the earlier cosmogonists were exempt. It has become necessary to show

that the Noachian cataclysm was strangely selective, in burying in the

beds which it is held by the class to have formed, now one group of

plants and animals, now quite another group, and anon yet another and

different group still; and all this many times repeated with such nice

care and discrimination, that not a single organism of the lower beds is

to be detected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of either

the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. Even this task, however,

just a little lightened by here and there a suppression of the facts,

has been attempted by the redoubtable Dean of York.[38] Fire and water

were, he conceives, equally agents in the great catastrophe that

destroyed the old world,--a circumstance which, if true, would have

furnished with an admirable apology the class of persons who, according

to the wit, would have cried out "Fire, fire," at the deluge. The dean

conceives that at the commencement of the Flood, when torrents of rain

were falling upon the land, numerous submarine volcanoes began to

disgorge their molten contents into the sea, destroying the fish, and

all other marine productions, by the intensity of the heat, and at the

same time locking them up in strata formed of the erupted matter. This

process took place ere the land floods, laden with the spoils of island

and continent, and the accompanying mud and sand, could arrive at the

remoter depths; which, however, they ultimately reached, and formed a

second formation, overlying the first. There were thus two formations

originated,--a marine formation below, and a terrestrial or fresh water

formation above; but as these two deposits could not be made to include

all the geological phenomena with which even the dean was acquainted, he

had nicely to parcel out the work of his volcanoes on the one hand, and

that of his land floods on the other, into separate fits or paroxysms,

each of which served to entomb a distinct class of creatures, and

originate a definite set of rocks. Thus, the first work of his volcanoes

was to form the Transition series of strata. As a commencement of the

whole, the internal fire blew up from the bed of the ocean, in

tremendous explosions, vast quantities of pulverized rock mixed with

clay, which, slowly subsiding, and covering up, as it sank, shells,

stone-lilies, and trilobites, formed the Silurian rocks. A second

explosion brought up the vents of the volcanoes to the level of the

ocean; and while the Old Red Sandstone, thus produced, and charged with

fish killed by the heat, was settling on their flanks, they themselves,

as if seized by black vomit, began to disgorge in vast quantities, coal

in the liquid state. Very opportunely, just ere it cooled, enormous

quantities of vegetables, washed out to sea by the extraordinary land

floods, were precipitated immediately over it; and, sticking in its

viscid surface, or sinking into its substance through cracks formed in

it during the cooling, they became attached to it in such considerable

masses, as to lead long after to the very mistaken notion that coal

itself was of vegetable origin. Then there ensued another deposit of red

sand, with salt boiled into it; and then a deposition of lime and clay.

The land floods still continuing, the great Sauroid reptiles which had

haunted the rivers and lower plains began to yield to their force, and

their carcasses, floating out to sea, sank amid the slowly subsiding

lime and clay, now known as the Lias. The volcanoes too were still very

active; and the lighter shells, ammonites, and the like, which had been

previously bobbing up and down on the boiling surface, now sank by

myriads; for the viscid argillaceous mud thrown up by the fiery

ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and dragged them down. Then

came the formation of the Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by

the waves; and last of all, the Green sand and Chalk; after which the

waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now forms the bed of

the ocean, but which previous to the cataclysm had been the place of the

land. The dean, as he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding

the true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, which

arrived in his arrangement a little too soon. He spoke, too--if a

newspaper report is to be credited--of a heavy creature soon overtaken

and drowned by the rising waters, which he termed the _pterogactylus_,

and which does not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of

it, since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he make any

provision in his arrangement for the formation of the various Tertiary

deposits. But then all these are slight matters, that could be very

easily woven into his hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill

sides, first such of the weightier animals would perish as could not

readily climb steep acclivities; and then the oxen, the horses, the

deer, and the goats, with the lighter carnivora, who, as they would die

last,--some of them not until the final disappearance of the

hill-tops,--would of course be entombed in the upper deposits. Such is

the hypothesis of the Dean of York,--a hypothesis of which it may be

justly affirmed, that it is well nigh as ingenious as the circumstances

of the case permit, and against which little else can be urged than that

it must seem rather cumbrous and fanciful to the class who do not know

geology, and, on the whole, somewhat inadequate to the class who do.

The Flood, however, is not left to do the whole geologic work, by even

such of the anti-geologists as assign to it the largest share. A great

unrecorded convulsion which accompanied the Fall is held by some of

their number to have greatly assisted, by laying down the older

formations of the fossiliferous rocks; and very much is said to have

been done during the extended antediluvian period that succeeded it. One

of perhaps the most amusing though least known of the writers that take

this special view is a Scotchman, resident in a secluded provincial

town, who for the last twelve or fifteen years has been printing

ingenious little books against the infidel geologists, and getting

letters of similar character inserted in such of our country newspapers

as are ambitious of rendering their science equal to their literature.

And from the great trouble which he has taken with the writings of the

individual who now addresses you, he seems to regard them as peculiarly

unsolid and dangerous. According to this profound cosmogonist, the world

before the Fall was rather more than twice its present size, and very

artificially constructed.[39] It was a hollow ball, supported inside by

a framework of metal wrought into hexagonal reticulations, somewhat like

the framework of the great iron bridge over the river Wear at

Sunderland; and which had an open space in its centre, occupied by a

vast tubular furnace lying direct south and north, which threw out huge

volumes of flame towards the poles. Over the reticulated framework there

rose a great, thick _firmament_ of metal, which formed the inner shell

of the globe; over the metal there lay a considerably thicker shell of

granite; and over the granite, a thinner shell of a substance not

specified, perhaps not known, but which, from its being completely

water-tight, served the purpose of the layer of asphalt or _terra cotta_

which the architect spreads over his flat roofs, or on the tops of his

sloping terraces, afterwards to be covered with soil and laid out into

gardens. Such, it seems, was that portion of the framework of our great

globe which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster framework of the

little globes used in schools; while its uppermost layer,--correspondent

with the slips of the map which the geographer pastes on the model and

then varnishes,--was formed of earth and water, economically laid out

into "most useful and tasteful configurations,"--the earth into pretty

little rising grounds and valleys, and the water into seas and lakes of

no great extent, but which formed, from their very handsome

combinations, "a terraqueous surface all over PERFECTLY PARADISAICAL."

Over this exquisitely neat earth there lay an enveloping atmosphere,

greatly thinner and less dense than the air at present is, and

incapable, in consequence, of being agitated by storms; while directly

over the northern and southern extremities of the world the polar

auroras, now so fitful and broken, extended in a permanent arch, and

gave light, during the long dark winters, to the regions lying below.

And as warmth was as necessary to the paradisaical perfection of these

districts as light, they received the necessary heat from the great

double-acting furnace in the interior, which, belching out flames at

both ends, acted powerfully against the polar portions of the metallic

crust or shell, and thus maintained the necessary glow in the absence of

the sun, on the principle on which a frying-pan or Scotch _girdle_ is

heated when placed by the cookmaid over the fire. And such, according to

this excellent world-fashioner and very zealous man, was the

construction of that unblighted and unbroken earth which was of old

pronounced to be "very good." The Fall, however, produced a most

remarkable and singularly disastrous change. The earth was somehow

partially crushed and broken, contemporaneously with the event,--like a

strong fishing basket when it accidentally falls from a coach-top under

the wheel; and, from a most interesting colored copperplate that

illustrates one of the author's treatises (for he draws as well as he

writes), the exact damage which it received can be minutely estimated.

The interior network was compressed into all sorts of irregular

polygons; the iron firmament was broken into great fragments,--some of

which may be seen in the print hanging down into the hollow interior,

like patches of broken plaster dangling from a ceiling, suspended by the

hairs originally employed to give the necessary tenacity to the lime.

The great granitic shell was also broken, but broken so nicely, on the

principle of the arch, that the pieces remained in nearly their original

places. Finally, vast rents are seen to occur in the cement and soil of

the outer crust; and these great rents, which must have formed enormous

gulfs and deep interminable ravines, were destined, it would seem, to

perform a most important part in the future geology of the globe.

Forming impassable lines of demarcation between the several portions

into which they broke up the earth's surface, they imprisoned the

recently created animals in separate groups, kept as completely from

mixing together as the fallow-deer of one loftily-walled park are kept

from mixing with the white oxen of another loftily-walled park, or as

the kangaroos or duck-billed quadrupeds of Australia are kept by the

surrounding ocean from mixing with the tigers of Sumatra or the

tortoises of Madagascar. I employ the writer's own happy

illustration:--"In some places these fragments" of the earth's crust

"would be piled more or less above each other, and in others quite

detached and isolated, like fragments of ice on the bank of a river

after a thaw." They would of course be on very different levels, each

having, as I have said, a distinct group of animals of its own; and

when, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, the great

catastrophe of the Flood came on, it would necessarily find, as it rose

along the levels, and submerged platform after platform in succession, a

different and yet different set of creatures to kill. To borrow from the

description of this ingenious cosmogonist, "those on the lower fragments

would be first engulphed, and their races completely extinguished from

off the surface, and deposited in the earth; then those on higher and

higher upwards, till the whole became submerged. And we have only to

suppose that man, with the present survivors, were those that occupied

one of the higher table-lands when the Flood commenced (and of course in

that case Noah could collect into the ark only out of those of his own

country); then the result would be, that man and his present

contemporaries would be among the last overwhelmed. This will

sufficiently account for the fact of his and their remains not being

found deep in the earth....

"The two most interesting geological facts therefore, namely, that

distinct organisms are to be found in distinct formations respectively;

and secondly, _that no remains of man, and few or none of the other

races at present surviving, are to be found in any but comparatively

recent formations,_--these two grand facts of geology, we say, instead

of pointing back to vast cycles of ages before the creation, seem to

point merely to the peculiar physical circumstances of the fallen planet

in the interval between those two eventful stages in its history, the

Fall and Flood, and the natural consequences of these circumstances in

causing distinct divisions, and some of these of different elevations,

among the organic living creatures, during the interval." One other

circumstance completes this really original and beautiful hypothesis.

The cosmogonist holds that the Flood,--no mere tranquil rising of the

waters, as some suppose,--was accompanied by terrible convulsions, which

reduced to utter ruin the already shattered earth. The granitic dome

fell inwards upon the central furnace; and the fires, bursting outwards

under the enormous pressure, found vent at the surface, and made the

volcanoes. And this collapsed and diminished world,--scarce half the

bulk of the old one,--with no heating furnace under its polar regions,

nor aught save the merest tatters of an aurora flitting occasionally

over them,--greatly too dense in itself, and surrounded by a greatly too

dense atmosphere,--with its huge mountains, vast oceans, wide steppes,

and arid deserts, with its snows, its frosts, its drenching rains, its

horrible tempests, its terrible thunder storms, and devastating

earthquakes,--all alike frightful defects, not in the original plan,--is

not only unlike the primeval world, not very good, or, unlike the

antediluvian world, tolerably good, but not good at all. "On taking a

bird's-eye view of the geographical and hydrographical features or

superficies of the globe," says this bold writer, "any unprejudiced

person must at once admit, that in either of these departments there is

scarce a trace of that beautiful, tasteful, and economical design which

we have a right to expect from the admitted qualities of the great

Author, and his avowed object in the structure and report of it when

newly finished." It is added, however, that "its _present object_, as

the _Siberia_--the penal settlement--of expatriated rebels, it is in its

_present state_ well calculated to fulfil."

It may be worth mentioning, that the writer who sets himself after a

fashion so peculiar to assert and justify the ways of Providence against

the geologists resides in one of the loveliest districts in Scotland,--a

district, however, shaggy with rock, and overshadowed by great

mountains, and occasionally visited by earthquake tremors, and both snow

and thunder storms, and so, with all its wild beauty to other eyes,

merely, I must suppose, one of the rougher districts of the penal

Siberia in his. He is, indeed, particularly severe upon mountains;

though not, as he tells us, wholly devoid of a lurking prejudice in

their favor. But what weak prejudice might palliate or plead for, his

better judgment condemns. "See," says this judicious writer, "vast

districts of the globe disfigured by tremendous masses of rugged and

almost barren mountains.... What, cry some, would you bury as

deformities the lofty peak and rugged mountain brow, nature's

palaces,--generally the grandest and most sublime objects in natural

scenery! We cordially assure the reader we are by no means prejudiced

against these grand objects; _for if prejudice we have on the subject,

it is rather on the other side_. It is therefore the force of evidence

alone makes us,--reluctantly we admit,--give up these to rank among the

derangements and deformities of nature. She, according to her usual

_taste_ and _economy_, would never be at the expense of rearing, and

that upon ground _that might have otherwise been much better occupied_,

such unwieldy, useless masses of matter, merely for the sake of

gratifying the taste for grandeur and sublimity in a few of her sons,

nor, indeed, for any other use we ever heard ascribed to them....

According to _our_ test, a rich and gently undulatory surface,

intersected with rivulets and sheets of water, in the places taken up by

these elevations, would be far better, as combining in the highest

degree the _utile cum dulce_."[40] To such of my audience as are

familiar with Dr. Thomas Burnet's "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1684),

that revolution in the cycle of hypothesis to which I have referred, and

through which the visionaries of the later ages return to the dreams

which had occupied the visionaries of an earlier time, must be

sufficiently apparent in this passage. For not only does Burnet speak

after the same manner of hills and mountains, but also of an idle,

ill-founded prejudice entertained in their favor. We find him thus

summing up a general survey of the mountains of the globe:--"Look upon

these great ranges: in what confusion do they lie! They have neither

form nor beauty, nor shape, nor order, no more than the clouds in the

air. Then, how barren, how desolate, how naked are they! How they stand

neglected by nature! Neither the rains can soften them, nor the dews

from heaven make them fruitful. I give this short survey of the

mountains of the earth _to help to remove that prejudice we are apt to

have_, or that conceit that the present earth is regularly formed....

There is nothing in nature," adds this writer, "more shapeless and

ill-figured than an old rock or a mountain."

I leave it to my audience to determine how far this depreciatory

view,--whether regarded as that of Dr. Burnet or of the modern

anti-geologist,--agrees with the estimate of the higher minds, or

whether it manifests the proper respect for the adorable Being who, in

his infinite wisdom, made our world what it is. Let me next show that

some of even the abler and more respectable anti-geologists exhibit no

very profound veneration for the letter of Scripture, when, instead of

bearing, as they think, against the deductions of their opponents, they

find it directly opposed to fancies of their own. It is held by not a

few among them, that at the Deluge the sea and land changed places. When

the waters receded, it was found, they allege, that the old land had

become ocean, and the old ocean had become land; and as there are

certain rivers which are described in Scripture as flowing beside Eden,

and which, judging by the names given them, still exist, it has become

imperative on the assertors of the hypothesis to show that the rivers

which now drain tracts of what they hold was then sea, and that fall

into seas which they hold were then land, could not by any possibility

have formed the boundaries of the old Adamic garden. Let us mark how Mr.

Granville Penn,--certainly one of the most extensively informed of his

class,--deals with this difficulty.[41] There are, he argues, certain

great corruptions of Scripture. What had been at first written as

marginal notes by uninspired men, and were in some cases very erroneous

and absurd, came in the course of transcription to be transferred,

wholly by mistake, from the side of the page into the body of the text;

and thus, in at least a few places, the Scriptures were vitiated, and

now declare, instead of Divine truth, what is neither sense nor fact.

And on this very general, and certainly most perilous ground, he goes on

to argue, unsupported by a single ancient manuscript, and solely on what

he terms internal evidence, that the verses in Genesis which conflict

with his hypothesis must be regarded as mere idle glosses, ignorantly or

surreptitiously introduced into the text by the ancient copyists. "In

the second chapter of Genesis," we find him saying, "_there appears an

internal critical evidence_ of an insertion of the 11th, 12th, 13th, and

14th verses, similar to that of the 4th verse of the 5th chapter of St.

John, and constituting, in a similar manner, a _parenthesis_

intersecting the thread of the narrative, and introduced solely for a

similar purpose of illustration. It does not wear the character of the

simple narrative in which it appears, but _of the surcharge of the gloss

or note of a later age, founded upon the fanciful traditions then

prevailing with respect to the situation of the ancient Paradise_." This

certainly is cutting the knot; and, if erected into a precedent by the

geologist, would no doubt greatly facilitate the labor of

reconciliation. It would, however, be perilous work for _him_. "A wolf,"

says Plutarch, "peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were

assembled, saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. 'Ye

gods!' he exclaimed, 'what a clamor these men would have raised if they

had caught _me_ at such a banquet.'" I need scarcely add, that the

hypothesis in whose behalf Scripture is thus divested of its authority,

and recklessly cast aside, is entirely a worthless one; and that the

various continents of the globe, instead of all dating from one period

little more than four thousand years back, are of very various

ages,--some of them comparatively modern, though absolutely old in

relation to human history; and some of so hoar an antiquity, that the

term since man appeared upon earth might be employed as a mere unit to

measure it by.

It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such strange liberties

with a book which he professes to respect, and which he must have had

many opportunities of knowing, should take still greater liberties with

a science for which he entertains no respect whatever, and of whose

first principles he is palpably ignorant. And yet the wild recklessness

of some of his explanations of geological phenomena must somewhat

astonish all sufficiently acquainted with the science to know that the

place and relations of its various formations have been long since

determined, and now as certainly form the regulating data of the

practical miner, as the places and relations long since determined by

the geographer form the regulating data of the practical navigator or

engineer. It is as certain, for instance, that the Oolitic system

underlies the Green Sand and the Chalk, with all the various formations

of the Tertiary division,--Eocene Miocene, Pliocene, and

Pleistocene,--as that York is situated to the south of Edinburgh, or

that both these cities lie very considerably to the north of London and

Paris. And the anti-geologist who would argue, in the heat of

controversy, that the Oolite and the Pleistocene were contemporaneous

deposits, would be no more worthy of reply than the anti-geographer who

would assert, in order to serve some argumentative purpose, that the

North Cape lies in the same latitudinal parallel as South California, or

that Terra del Fuego is but a day's sailing from Iceland. And yet such,

as I intimated on a former evening, is the line taken up by Mr.

Granville Penn, in dealing with the difficulties of the Kirkdale Cave,

so remarkable for its accumulations of gnawed bones of the Pleistocene

ages,--especially for its bones of hyænas, tigers, bears, wolves,

rhinoceroses, and elephants. The cave occurs in the moorlands of

Yorkshire, in a limestone rock of that Oolitic division to which the

Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag belong, and contains corals and shells

that had passed into extinction long even ere the Tertiary period began;

while in the cave itself, mixed with bones of the extinct mammals of the

geologic age in immediate advance of the present one, there have been

found the contemporary remains of animals that still live in our fields

and woods, such as the hare, the rabbit, the weasel, and the water rat.

And we find Mr. Penn assigning both the Oolitic rock in which the cave

is hollowed, and the mammalian remains of the cave itself, equally to

the period of the deluge. The limestone existed at that time, it would

seem, as a soft calcareous paste, into which the animal remains, floated

northwards from intertropical regions on the waters of the Flood, were

precipitated in vast quantities, and sank, and then, fermenting under

the putrefactive influences, the gas which they formed blow up the

yielding lime and mud around them into a long narrow cave, just as a

glass-blower blows up a bottle, or as a little yeast blows up into

similar but greatly smaller cavities a bit of leaven. And the

stalactites and stalagmites which encrust the Kirkdale Cave are, Mr.

Penn holds, simply the last runnings of the lime that exuded after the

general mass had begun to set. Certainly any one disposed to take such

liberties with the Bible on the one hand, and with geologic science on

the other, as those taken in the given instances by this most formidable

of the anti-geologists, could have but little difficulty in making

either Scripture as geological or geology as Scriptural as he had a

mind. His chief danger would be that of making the sounder theologians

just a little angry, and of escaping, unless quoted for the joke's sake,

the notice of the geologists altogether. In truth, the extreme absurdity

of our later anti-geologists in virtually contending, in the

controversy, that _their_ ignorance of an interesting science, founded

on millions of determined facts, ought to be permitted to weigh against

the knowledge of the men who have studied it most thoroughly, forms

their best defence. It secures them against all save neglect. As,

however, some of their number are well meaning men, who would not be

ridiculous if they could help it, and only oppose themselves to the

geologists because they deem them mischievous and in error, it may be

worth while showing them, by an example or two, the ludicrous nature of

the positions which in their honest ignorance they permit themselves to

occupy, and the real scope and bearing of the arguments which they

unwittingly permit themselves to use. I shall adduce two several

instances of reasoning, directed by the anti-geologists _against_ their

antagonists (as they themselves believed), but which, from their

ignorance of the true state of the argument, and of the bearing of the

facts with which they dealt, in reality made out for these antagonists

as strong a case as they could possibly have made out for themselves.

And I am sure that, rather than be found siding with their opponents,

the anti-geologists would be content even to acquire a little geology.

I shall select my first instance from the records of the annual

controversy which used to rage some ten or fifteen years ago, in

sermons, newspapers, and magazines, immediately after every meeting of

the British Association. A religious Dublin newspaper,--the "Statesman

and Record,"--since extinct, took always an active part in these

discussions on the anti-geological side, and boldly affirmed, as in a

number now before me, that geology had the devil for its author. A

learned correspondent of the paper, who was, however, somewhat more

charitable, thought that at least the _facts_ of the science might be

exempted from a condemnation so sweeping; nay, that, well interpreted,

they might be found decidedly opposed to at least the more mischievous

deductions of the geologists; and in illustrating the point, we find him

thus arguing, from certain appearances in the valley of the Nile, that

the globe which we inhabit cannot possibly be more than six thousand

years old.[42] "The valley of the Nile," says this writer, "is known to

be covered with a bed of slime which the river has deposited in its

periodical inundations, and which rests on a foundation of sand, like

that of the adjacent desert. The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte

in his Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain the

thickness and depth of this superincumbent bed. They dug about two

hundred pits, and carefully measured the thickness in the transversal

section of the valley, where the deposit had been free from obstacles,

and had not been materially increased or lessened by local causes. They

found the mean of all these measurements to be six and a half metres, or

rather more than twenty feet. M. Gironde endeavored to determine the

quantity of slime deposited in a century; and he found that the

elevation of soil in that period was rather less than four inches and a

half! Dividing the total thickness of the bed by the centenary

elevation, he found the quotient 56.50; whence it followed that the

inundations had commenced 5650 years before the year 1800, when the

experiments were made,--a number which only differed 159 years from the

Mosaic date. The difference is not very important, when it is considered

that the most trifling error, whether in the measure of the entire

superincumbent bed, or in the valuation of the quantity of slime

deposited in a century, affects the final results. Notwithstanding this,

the coincidence between the sacred historian and the computations of

science is remarkable, and furnishes one proof more of the harmony

existing between nature and revelation. An honest experimentalist was

constrained to arrive at this conclusion at a period when the infidel

school of our continental neighbors was in high feather. I am sorry to

add, that the result of his own calculation had not that effect on the

philosopher himself, or his free-thinking associates, which, for their

own sakes, was desirable; but it is no less valuable to us on that

account; for we know that an unwilling witness to the truth is worth a

score of evidences already prejudiced in its favor."

Now, this is clear, distinct statement; and nothing can be more evident

than that the theologian who makes it holds he is reasoning with

conclusive effect in behalf of what may be termed the short

chronology,--not in its legitimate connection with the recent

introduction of the human species, but in its supposed bearing on the

age of the earth. And in doing so he commits himself to the apparent

positive fact, determined on what may be regarded as geologic data, that

the river Nile has been flowing over its bed for about as many years as

have elapsed, according to the Hebrew chronology adopted by Usher, since

the creation of man, and no more. To the integrity of this inference he

pledges himself, as an inference to which the infidel ought to have

yielded, as conclusive in its bearing on the question of the earth's

age, and as of singular value to the believer who sets himself to deal

with the evidences of his faith. Now, without referring to the

circumstance that the data on which the French savans under Napoleon

founded have since been challenged by geologists, such as Lieutenant

Newbold and Sir G. Wilkinson, who have carefully surveyed the rocks and

soils of Egypt with the assistance of clearer light than existed at the

commencement of the century, let us, for the argument's sake, hold the

inference to be quite as good as this theologian regards it. And see, we

urge upon him, that you yourself do not suffer it to drop should you

find that it commits you to the other side of the argument. Be at least

as fair and honest as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six

and a half metres of silt and slime,--representative, let us hold, of

from five to six thousand years,--rest, you say, on "a foundation of

sand like that of the adjacent desert." But have you ascertained on what

the sand rests? I know nothing of that, replies the theologian; I had

not even thought of that. But the geologist has thought of it, we reply;

and has spent much time under the hot sun in ascertaining the point. For

nearly three hundred miles,--from the inner boundaries of the delta to

within a few hours' journey of the cataracts,--the silt and sand rest on

what is known as the "marine" or nummulitic limestone,--a formation of

great extent, for it runs into the Nubian desert on the one hand, and

into the Libyan desert on the other; and which, though it abounds in the

animalcules of the European chalk, is held to belong, in at least its

upper beds, which are charged with nummulites, to the earlier Eocene.

Over this marine limestone there rests a newer formation, of later

Tertiary age, which contains the casts of sea shells, and whole forests

of dicotyledonous trees, converted into a flint-like chert; and over all

repose the sands and gravels of the desert. Underneath the silt of the

river, then, and the sand of the desert, lie these two formations of the

Tertiary division. The lower, which is of great thickness, must have

been of slow formation. It is composed almost exclusively, in many

parts, of microscopic animals, and abounds in others in fossil

shells,--nautili, ostreadæ, turritella, and nummulites, with corals,

sponges, the remains of crustacea, and the teeth of fishes. And between

the period of its deposition and that of the formation which rests upon

it the surface of what is now Egypt must have been elevated over the

surface of the sea, to be covered, in the course of ages, by great

forests, which, ere the land assumed its present form and level, were

submerged by another oscillation of the surface, and petrified amid beds

of a siliceous sand at the bottom of the ocean. Nor is the underlying

marine limestone by any means the oldest of the sedimentary rocks of

Egypt. It rests on a sandstone of Permian or Triassic age; the sandstone

rests, in turn, on the famous Breccia de Verde of Egypt; and the Breccia

on a group of Azoic rocks, gneisses, quartzes, mica schists, and clay

slates, that wrap round the granitic nucleus of Syene. The formations of

Egypt constitute a well-determined part of that great series of systems

which compose the upper portion of the earth's crust: its silt is by far

the most inconsiderable of its deposits; and if five thousand six

hundred and fifty years were exhausted in laying down layer after layer

of the twenty feet which form _its_ average thickness, what enormous

periods must we not demand in addition for the laying down of the forest

formation, of the marine limestone formation, of the New Red Sandstone

formation, of the Breccia de Verde formation, and, in short, for the

some ten miles of fossiliferous rock of which those deposits form such

definite, well-determined portions; besides the time necessary for the

production of the enormously developed Azoic rocks which lie under all!

The theologian, in this instance, instead of reasoning, as he himself

supposed, in behalf of the short chronology, has been making out a very

formidable case for the long one; and all that the geologist can have to

urge upon him in the circumstances is simply that he should act as he

holds the infidel ought to have done, and yield to the force of

evidence. I may mention in the passing, that some of the most ancient

buildings of Egypt are formed of the Tertiary marine limestones of the

country; the stones of the pyramids are charged with nummulites, known

to the Arabs as "Pharaoh's beans;" and these organisms stand out in high

relief on the weathered portions of the Great Sphinx. Some of the oldest

things in the world in their relation to human history,--erections, many

of which had survived the memory of their founders even in the days of

Herodotus,--are formed of materials so modern in their relation to the

geologic epochs, that they had no existence as rock until after the

Palæozoic and Secondary ages had gone by. Not only the Carboniferous

sandstone of the High Church and Parliament House of Edinburgh, but even

the Oolitic (that is, Portland stone) of Somerset House and St. Paul's,

are of an antiquity incalculably vast compared with the stone out of

which the oldest of the pyramids were fashioned.

[Illustration: Fig. 116.

NUMMULITES LÆVIGATA.

(_Pharaoh's Beans._)]

The second example which I shall adduce is one with which many of my

auditors must be already familiar. The Falls of Niagara are gradually

eating their way through an elevated tract of table-land, upwards

towards Lake Erie, at the rate of about fifty yards in forty years; and

it has been argued by Sir Charles Lyell, that as they are now seven

miles distant from Queenston, where the elevation of the plateaux

begins, they must have taken about ten thousand years to scoop out their

present deep channel through that space.[43] Ten thousand years ago the

Falls were, he infers, at Queenston; and the grounds on which he reasons

are exactly those on which one would infer that a laborer who had cut a

ditch two hundred yards long at the rate of ten yards per day, and was

still at work without pause or intermission, had begun to cut it just

twenty days previous. A reverend anti-geologist takes up Sir

Charles;[44] and, after denouncing the calculation as "a stab at the

Christian religion," seeing it involves the assertion that the "Falls

were actually at Queenston four thousand years before the creation of

the world according to Moses," he brings certain facts, adduced both by

other writers and Sir Charles himself, to bear on the calculation, such

as the fact that the deep trench through which the Niagara runs is much

narrower in its lower than in its upper reaches, and that the river must

have performed its work of excavation, when the breadth was less, at a

greatly quicker rate than now. And thus the work of excavating the

trench is brought fairly within six thousand years. Nor is the principle

of the reasoning bad. In our illustration of the ditch excavated by the

laborer we of course take it for granted that it is a ditch of the same

depth and breadth throughout, and excavated in the same sort of soil;

for if greatly narrower and shallower at one place than at another, or

dug in a greatly softer mould, the rate of its excavation at different

times might be very different indeed, and the general calculation widely

erroneous, if based on the ratio of progress when it went on most

slowly, taken as an average ratio for the whole. But the anti-geologist

provokes only a smile when, in his triumph, he exultingly exclaims, "It

is on grounds such as these that the most learned and voluminous among

English geologists disputes the Mosaic history of the Creation and

Deluge,--a strong proof that even men of argument on other subjects

often reason in the most childish and ridiculous manner, and on grounds

totally false, when they undertake to deny the truth of the Holy

Scriptures." Now, it must be wholly unnecessary to remark here, that it

is surely one thing to "undertake to deny the truth of the Holy

Scriptures," and quite another and different thing to hold that the

Niagara Falls may have been at Queenston ten thousand years ago; or

further, that it seems not in the least wise to stake the truth of

Revelation on any such issue. Let me request you, however, to observe,

that in one important respect this writer resembles the former one. The

former, ignorant of the various phenomena exhibited by the great

deposits of Egypt, exhausted all his five thousand six hundred years of

available time in accounting for the formation of one of the least of

them,--the silt of the Nile; and the latter, though he bids down Sir

Charles some four thousand four hundred years or so in the one item of

scooping out the bed of the St. Lawrence, at least expends the remainder

of the ten thousand,--his five thousand six hundred years,--in that work

of excavation alone, and leaves himself no further sums to set off

against the various geologic processes that may have preceded it.

In this case, as in the other, let us grant, for the argument's sake,

all the facts. Let us admit that the trench through which the St.

Lawrence now flows has been cut by the river in somewhat less than six

thousand years. But through what, let us ask, has it been cut? There can

exist no doubt on the subject: it has been cut through an ancient

graveyard of the Upper Silurian system, charged with the peculiar

fossils characteristic of what are known as the Clinton and Niagara

groups, and common, many of them, to the Upper Silurian of our own

country and of the European continent. _Leptæna depressa_ and

_Pentamerus oblongus_, two of the most frequent shells of the deposit,

occur also in equal abundance in the Dudley and Caradoc formations of

England; its prevailing encrinite, _Ichthyocrinus lævis_, is scarce

distinguishable from an encrinite which I have often picked up in the

quarries of the "Wren's Nest" (_Ichthyocrinus pyriformis_); while its

prevailing trilobite, _Phacops limulurus_, seems to be but a

transatlantic variety of our well known _Asaphus (Phacops) caudatus_.

Further, the sequence of the various formations both above and below the

Niagara group, is shown with remarkable distinctness in that part of the

world along the shores of the great lakes. They may be traced downward,

on the one hand, along the Lower Silurian deposits, to the

non-fossiliferous base on which the system rests, and upwards, on the

other, through the Old Red Sandstone and the Carboniferous Limestone, to

the workable Coal Measures. Both stratigraphically and palæontologically

the place in the scale of the Niagara graveyard can be definitely

determined; and a superficial deposit on the heights in its immediate

neighborhood shows that the river did not begin its work of excavation

among its long extinct shells, trilobites, and corals, until after not

only the great Palæozoic, but also the Secondary and Tertiary divisions

had been laid down, and the recent period ushered in. The superficial

shells of the adjacent heights belong to the Pleistocene age, and show

that in even that comparatively modern time the lower lands of Upper

Canada were submerged beneath the level of the ocean, and that a series

of deep seas, connected by broad sounds, occupied the place of the great

lakes. Not until the last upheaval of the land was the river now known

as the St. Lawrence called into existence, to begin its work of

excavation; and ere that event took place, fully ten miles of

fossiliferous rock had been deposited on the earth's surface, charged

with the remains of many succeeding creations. The deposit through which

the St. Lawrence is slowly mining its way is older than the river itself

by the vast breadth of the four Tertiary periods, by that of all the

Secondary ages,--Cretaceous, Oolitic, and Triassic,--by the periods,

too, of the Permian system, of the Carboniferous system, of the Old Red

system, and of the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian system. But a

simple illustration may better serve to show the true character of the

conclusion urged here by the opponent of Sir Charles, than any such line

of statement as that which I employ, however clear to the geologist. In

the year 1817, Prince's Street, in Edinburgh, was opened up to the

Calton Hill, and the Calton burying-ground cut through to the depth of

many feet by the roadway. Let us suppose that when the excavation has

been carried a hundred yards into the cemetery, a geologist, finding the

laborers cutting on the average about a yard per day, simply intimates

as his opinion that the laborers have been a hundred days at work. "No,"

replies a controversialist on the anti-geological side; "for the first

fifty yards, so soft was the subsoil, and so shallow the covering of

mould, that the laborers must have cut at the rate of two yards a day;

it has been merely for the last fifty yards that they have been

excavating at the present slow rate: they cannot have been more than

seventy-five days at work. I marvel exceedingly at the absurdity of

geological reasoners: _palpably the burying-ground of the Calton is only

seventy-five days old._" Now, such, in no exaggerated, but, on the

contrary, greatly modified form, is the argument that would limit the

age of the earth to the period during which the St. Lawrence has been

scooping out a channel for itself, from Queenston to Niagara, through an

ancient Silurian burying-ground. Both arguments alike confound the age

of the ancient burying-grounds with the date of the modern excavations

opened up through them; but in order to render the argument of my

illustration equally absurd with the other, it would be not only

necessary to infer that the Calton cemetery was only seventy-five days

old, but also that the rock on which it rested was no older.

But enough of follies such as these! I had marked a good many other

passages of similar character in the writings of the recent

anti-geologists, and would have little difficulty in filling a volume

with such; but it would be a useless, though mayhap curious work, and is

much better exhibited by specimen than as a whole. A little folly is

amusing, but much of it fatigues. There is a time coming, and now not

very distant, when the vagaries of the anti-geologists will be as

obsolete as those of the geographers of Salamanca, or as those of the

astronomers who upheld the orthodoxy of Ptolemy against Galileo and

Newton; and when they will be regarded as a sort of curious fossils,

very monstrous and bizarre, and altogether of an extinct type, but which

had once not only life, but were formidable. It will then be seen by all

what a noble vestibule the old geologic ages form to that human period

in which moral responsibility first began upon earth, and a creature

destined to immortality anticipated an eternal hereafter. There is

always much of the mean and the little in the worlds which man creates

for himself, and in the history which he gives them. Of all the

abortions of the middle ages which have come down to us, I know not a

more miserable one,--at once ludicrous and sad,--than that heavens and

earth of Cosmas _Indicopleustes_, the monk, which I illustrated by

diagrams in my last lecture (Figs. 114, 115). They are just such heavens

and earth as a monk might have made, and made too at a sitting. The

heavens, represented as a solid arch raised on tall walls, resemble, as

a whole, the arch which figures in the middle of a freemason's apron,

or, more homely still, the section of a wine cellar; while the earth

lies beneath as a great plain or floor, with a huge hill in the

distance, behind which the sun passes when it is night. And yet this

scheme gave law to the world for more than six centuries, and lay like a

nightmare on physical discovery, astronomic and geographical. The

anti-geologists have been less mischievous, for they live in a more

enlightened age; and we already see but the straggling remains of the

body, and know that the time cannot be far distant when it will be as

completely extinct as any of the old faunas. The great globe, ever

revolving on itself, and journeying in space round the sun, in obedience

to laws which it immortalized a Newton to discover and demonstrate, is

an infinitely more sublime and noble object than the earth of Cosmas

the monk, with its conical mountain and its crypt-like firmament; nor

can I doubt that its history throughout the long geologic ages,--its

strange story of successive creations, each placed in advance of that

which had gone before, and its succeeding organisms, vegetable and

animal, ranged according to their appearance in time, on principles

which our profounder students of natural science have but of late

determined,--will be found in an equal degree more worthy of its Divine

Author than that which would huddle the whole into a few literal days,

and convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit into a

hastily run-up erection of yesterday.

LECTURE ELEVENTH.

ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.[45]