62 The Bible of Nature 



except those of which the principle was known, 

 and no extraordinary events to be alleged to ex- 

 plain a common appearance." 



Age of the Earth. Before we consider the precise 

 nature of the scientific interpretation of the past, 

 let us pause for a moment to look back on the 

 history objectively. We are impressed by the an- 

 tiquity of it all. It is well known that at the end 

 of the eighteenth century, or later, there was, 

 even among geologists, a widespread belief that 

 the habitable earth was some 6,000 years old 

 a belief arrived at by a peculiar wresting of the 

 Scriptures. But when James Hutton began to 

 see "the ruins of an older world in the present 

 structure of the globe," when William Smith be- 

 gan to disclose the succession of strata and to tell 

 the tale of age before age stretching back into a 

 distant past, when Cuvier and others began to 

 outline a succession of faunas and floras leading 

 us back and back to the mist of life's beginnings, 

 there was a reaction to an opposite extreme, and 

 many began to think of the earth as a sort of in- 

 animate Methuselah, "without beginning of days 

 or end of years." 



Slowly, attempts at measurement began. The 

 geologists tried to measure the thickness of strati- 

 fied rocks, sometimes estimated at 100,000, some- 

 times at 265,000 feet; they divided this by the ob- 

 served rate of denudation and deposition (a foot 



