NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 605 



But, while these attempts to preserve the old theory as to fossil 

 remains of lower animals were thus pressed, there appeared upon the 

 geological field a new scientific column far more terrible to the old 

 doctrines than any which had been seen previously. 



For, just at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 

 geologists began to examine the caves and beds of drift in various 

 parts of the world ; and, within a few years from that time, a series 

 of discoveries began in France, in Belgium, in England, in Brazil, in 

 Sicily, and in India which have established the fact that a period of 

 time much greater than any which had before been thought of had 

 elapsed since the first human occupation of the earth. The chronol- 

 ogies of Archbishop Usher, Petavius, Bossuet, and the other great 

 authorities on which theology had securely leaned, fell. It was clearly 

 seen that, no matter how well based upon the Old Testament genealo- 

 gies and lives of the patriarchs, all these systems must go for noth- 

 ing. The most conservative geologists were gradually obliged to 

 admit that man had been upon the earth not merely six thousand, or 

 sixty thousand, or one hundred and sixty thousand years. A very 

 moderate estimate has made the time that the evolution of human 

 civilization under the guidance of man has required fully a quarter of 

 a million of years.* 



The supporters of a theory based upon the letter of Scripture, who 

 had so long taken the offensive, were now obliged to fight upon the 

 defensive and at fearful odds. Various lines of defense were taken ; 

 but perhaps the most pathetic effort was that made in the year 1857, 

 in England, by Gosse. As a naturalist he had rendered great services 

 to zoological science, but he now concentrated his energies upon one 

 last effort to save the literal interpretation of Genesis and the theologi- 

 cal structure built upon it. In his work entitled "Omphalos" he de- 

 veloped the theory previously urged by Granville Penn, and asserted a 

 new principle, called "prochronisra." In accordance with this, all things 

 were created by the Almighty hand literally within the six days, each 

 made up of " the evening and the morning," and each great branch of 

 creation was brought into existence in an instant. Accepting a decla- 

 ration of Dr. Ure, that " neither reason nor revelation will justify us 

 in extending the origin of the material system beyond six thousand 

 years from our own days," Gosse held that all the evidences of con- 

 vulsive changes and long epochs in strata, rocks, minerals, and fossils 

 are simply " appearances " — only that and nothing more. Among 

 these mere " appearances," all created instantaneously, were the glacial 

 furrows and scratches on rocks, the marks of retreat seen in the wear- 

 ing away of rocky masses, as at Niagara, the tilted and twisted strata, 

 the piles of lava from extinct volcanoes, the fossils of every sort in 

 every part of the earth, the foot-tracks of birds and reptiles, the half- 



* See Professor Marsh's address as President of the Society for the Advancement of 

 Science, in 1879. 



