NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 601 



in exactly six days of ordinary time, each made up of " the evening 

 and the morning " ; and he ended with a piece of that peculiar pre- 

 sumption so familiar to the world, by calling on Cuvier and all other 

 geologists to " ask for the old paths and walk therein until they shall 

 simplify their system and reduce their numerous revolutions to the 

 two events or epochs only — the six days of Creation and the Deluge." * 

 The geologists showed no disposition to yield to this peremptory sum- 

 mons ; on the contrary, the President of the British Geological So- 

 ciety, and even so eminent a churchman and geologist as Dean Buck- 

 land, soon acknowledged that facts obliged them to give up the theory 

 that the fossils of the coal-measures were deposited at the Deluge of 

 Noah, and to deny that the Deluge was universal. The combat deep- 

 ened ; churchmen and dissenters were alike aroused ; from pulpit and 

 press missiles were showered upon men of science. As typical we 

 may take Fairholme, who in 183T published his " 31osaic Deluge " and 

 argued that no early convulsions of the earth, such as those supposed 

 by geologists, could have taken place, because there could have been 

 no deluge " before moral guilt could possibly have been incurred " — 

 that is to say, before the creation of mankind. In touching terms he 

 bewailed the defection of the President of the Geological Society and 

 Dean Buckland — protesting against geologists who " persist in closing 

 their eyes upon the solemn declarations of the Almighty." f 



Still the geologists continued to seek truth, and those theologians 

 who felt that denunciation of science as " godless " could accomplish lit- 

 tle labored upon schemes for reconciling geology with Genesis. Some 

 of these show amazing ingenuity, but an eminent religious authority, 

 going over them with great thoroughness, has well characterized them 

 as "daring and fanciful." J Such attempts have been variously classi- 

 fied ; but the fact regarding them all is that each mixes up more or 

 less of science with more or less of Scripture, and produces a result 

 more or less absurd. Though a few men here and there have continued 

 these exercises, the capitulation of the party which set the literal ac- 

 count of the Deluge of Noah against the facts revealed by geology 

 was at last clearly made. 



One of the first evidences of the completeness of this surrender has 

 been so well related by the eminent physiologist. Dr. W. B. Carpenter, 

 that it may best be given in his own words : "You are familiar with 

 a book of considerable value. Dr. W. Smith's * Dictionary of the Bible.' 

 I happened to know the influences under which that dictionary was 

 framed. The idea of the publisher and of the editor was to give as 

 much scholarship and such results of modern criticism as should be 

 compatible with a very judicious conservatism. There was to be no 

 objection to geology, but the universality of the Deluge was to be 



* See the works of Granville Penn, vol. ii, p. 273, 



t See Fairholme, "Mosaic Deluge," London, 1837, p. 358. 



X See Shields, " The Final Philosophy," p. 340. 



