121 



his family ; then God said, " earth ! swallow up thy waters, and 

 thou, O heavens ! withhold thy rain, and immediately the waters 

 abated." 



But it is impossible here to follow the many curious theories of 

 creation and the early "iews as to the early condition of the earth 

 down to the present, ^''or many centuries, in fact the time has 

 in some places scarcely yet expired, a conflict between the theologians 

 and the men of science concerning these points and the causes of the 

 various geological phenomena was waged with considerable bitterness 

 in whicli it did not always happen that the views of the former were con- 

 sistent either with reason, truth or common sense, The chronology of the 

 Bible evolved by Archbishop Usher and first published in 1701 limited 

 the age of all things to 4004 years B.C., so that the theories necessary 

 to compress the history of the earth as evidenced by the succession of 

 strata everywhere apparent, and of which many contained the remains of 

 extinct animals and plants, into this limited period, were often exceed- 

 ingly curious. While the rival doctrines of the NejAunists, who held 

 that the present physical condition of the earth was due almost entirely 

 to aqueous agencies, and the Vulcanists, who maintained that the active 

 agent was principally fire, caused a wordy warfare almost if not quite 

 as violent as the other. As late as 1809 De Luc propounded the 

 hypothesis that the form and composition of the continents and their 

 existence above the seas must be ascribed to causes no longer in oper- 

 ation. These continents, he held, emerged at no very remote period 

 upon the sudden retreat of the ocean, the waters of which made their 

 way into subterranean caverns. The formation of the rocks of the 

 earth's crust, he held, began with the precipitation of granite from a 

 primordial liquid, after which other strata containing the remains of 

 organized bodies were deposited, till at last the present sea remained 

 as the residuum of the primordial liquid and no longer continued to 

 produce mineral strata; while Werner, who is generally considered the 

 leader of the Neptunists' philosophy, held the theory of universal for. 

 mations, which had been simultaneously precipitated over the whole 

 earth from a common menstruum or chaotic fluid, and regarded basalts 

 and other rocks, which we now know to be of igneous orio-jn, as 

 precipitates by chemical action from water. 



