NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 387 



of preservation. Here, also, recognition of the time element be- 

 came inevitable and subversive of the idea of sadden and special 

 creation. Hitherto belief in the antiquity of man was excep- 

 tional, and proofs of such antiquity were almost wholly wanting. 

 This discovery, therefore, was profoundly important and of far- 

 reaching significance not only in palaeontology but also in the 

 foundation of what is to-day known as anthropology. 



ANCIENT AND MODERN THEORIES OF COSMOGONY. When 

 the wonder and curiosity of primitive man developed into specu- 

 lation touching his origin, or the origin of things about him, or 

 the origin of the visible universe, cosmogony began. Until the 

 middle of the nineteenth century the Jewish or Mosaic cosmogony 

 embodied in the first chapter of the Hebrew Scriptures, and ac- 

 counting for the origin of the cosmos, both organic and inorganic, 

 by a sudden and special creation, was almost universally accepted 

 throughout Christendom. Recent investigations indicate that 

 this theory was really pre-Jewish in origin and probably Baby- 

 lonian. If so, a cosmogony long antedating Greek theories pre- 

 vailed throughout Christian Europe and America to the middle of 

 the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century even Galileo, 

 Kepler, and Newton raised no question of its essential validity. 



Of the two great minds of the seventeenth century, Newton and 

 Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well as philosophical, one pro- 

 duced the theory of gravitation [and] the other objected to that 

 theory as subversive of natural religion. Asa Gray. 



The eighteenth century was an age of doubt. Descartes, who 

 "doubted whatever could be doubted," had been succeeded by 

 Voltaire and the encyclopaedists in France, and by Hume and 

 Gibbon in England, and incredulity, not to say scepticism, was in 

 the air. Yet no new theory of cosmogony appeared, and merely 

 to doubt an old hypothesis is neither to destroy nor to supplant 

 it. Observations, ideas, and discoveries, however, had long been 

 accumulating and were now multiplying, which were destined to 

 undermine the Mosaic theory and establish something very dif- 

 ferent, and more resembling Greek cosmogonies, in its place. 



