6oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Germany, belief that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah 

 was insisted upon as part of that faith essential to salvation.* 



But the steady work of science went on ; not all the force of the 

 Church — not even the splendid engravings in Scheuchzer's Bible — 

 could stop it ; and the foundations of this theological theory began to 

 crumble away. The process was, indeed, slow ; it required a hundred 

 and twenty years for the searchers of God's truth, as revealed in Nature 

 — such men as Hooke, Linnceus, Whitehurst, Daubenton, and Cuvier — 

 to push their works under this fabric of error, and, by statements which 

 could not be resisted, to undermine it. As we arrive at the beginning 

 of the nineteenth century, science is becoming irresistible in this field. 

 Blumenbach, Von Buch, and Schlotheim lead the way, but most im- 

 portant is the work of Cuvier. In the early years of the present cent- 

 ury, his researches among fossils began to throw new light into the 

 whole subject of geology : he was, indeed, very wary and diplomatic, 

 and seemed, like Voltaire, to feel that " among the wolves one must 

 howl a little." It was a time of reaction. Napoleon had made peace 

 with the Church, and to disturb that peace was akin to treason. Still, 

 by large but vague concessions, Cuvier kept the theologians satisfied, 

 while he undermined their strongest fortress. The danger was in- 

 stinctively felt by some of the champions of the Church, and typical 

 among these was Chateaubriand ; and in his best-known work, once so 

 great, now so little — the " Genius of Christianity " — he grappled with 

 the questions of creation by insisting upon a sort of general deception 

 *' in the beginning," under which everything was created by a sudden 

 fiat, but with appearances of pre-existence. His words are as follows : 

 " It was part of the perfection and harmony of the nature which was 

 displayed before men's eyes that the deserted nests of last year's birds 

 should be seen on the trees, and that the sea-shore should be covered 

 with shells which had been the abode of fish, and yet the world was 

 quite new, and nests and shells had never been inhabited." f But the 

 real victory was with Brongniart, who, about 1820, gave forth his 

 work on fossil plants, and thus built a barrier against which the ene- 

 mies of science raged in vain. J 



Still the struggle was not ended, and, a few years later, a forlorn 

 hope was led in England by Granville Penn. 



His fundamental thesis was that " our globe has undergone only 

 two revolutions, the Creation and the Deluge, and both by the imme- 

 diate fiat of the Almighty " ; he insisted that the Creation took place 



* For a candid summary of the proofs from geology, astronomy, and zoology, that 

 the Noachian Deluge was not universally or widely extended, sec McClintock and Strong, 

 "Cyclopaedia of Biblical Theology and Ecclesiastical Literature," article " Deluge." For 

 general history, see Lyell, D'Archiac, and Vezian. For special cases showing the bitter- 

 ness of the conflict, see the Rev. Mr. Davis's " Life of Rev. Dr. Pye Smith," passim. 



\ "G6nie du Christianisme," chapter v, pp. 1-14, cited by Reusch, vol. i, p. 250. 



X For admirable sketches of Brongniart and other paleobotanists, see Ward, as 

 above. 



