6o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



digested remains of weaker animals found in the fossilized bodies of 

 the stronger, the marks of hyenas' teeth on fossilized bones found in 

 various caves, and even the skeleton of the Siberian mammoth at St. 

 Petersburg with lumps of flesh bearing the marks of wolves' teeth — 

 all these, with all gaps and imperfections, he urged mankind to be- 

 lieve came into being in an instant. The preface of the work is es- 

 pecially touching, and ends with the prayer that science and Scripture 

 may be reconciled by his theory, and "that the God of truth will 

 deign so to use it, and if he do, to him be all the glory," * And at the 

 close of the whole book he declares : " The field is left clear and undis- 

 puted for the one witness on the opposite side, whose testimony is as 

 follows : " In six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and 

 all that in them is." This quotation he placed in capital letters, as the 

 final refutation of all that the science of geology had built. 



In other parts of Europe desjjerate attempts have been made in re- 

 cent times to save the letter of our sacred books by the revival of a 

 theory in some respects more striking. To shape this theory to recent 

 needs, vague reminiscences of a text in Job regarding fire beneath the 

 earth, and vague conceptions of speculations made by Humboldt and 

 Laplace, were mingled with Jewish tradition. Out of the mixture 

 thus obtained Schubert developed the idea that the Satanic " princi- 

 palities and powers " formerly inhabiting our universe plunged it into 

 the chaos from which it was newly created by a process accurately de- 

 scribed in Genesis. Kougemont made the earth one of the " morning 

 stars" of Job, reduced to chaos by Lucifer and his followers, and 

 thence developed in accordance with the nebular hypothesis. Kurtz 

 evolved from this theory an opinion that the geological disturbances 

 were caused by the opposition of the Devil to the rescue of our universe 

 from chaos by the Almighty. Delitzsch put a similar idea into a 

 more scholastic jargon ; but most desperate of all were the statements 

 of Dr. Anton Westermeyer, of Munich, in his " The Old Testament 

 vindicated from Modern Infidel Objections," The following passage 

 will serve to show his ideas : " By the fructifying brooding of the 

 Divine spirit on the waters of the deep, creative forces began to stir ; 

 the devils who inhabited the primeval darkness and considered it their 

 own abode saw that they were to be driven from their possessions, or 

 at least that their place of habitation was to be contracted, and they 

 therefore tried to frustrate God's plan of creation and exert all that 

 remained to them of might and power to hinder or at least to mar the 

 new creation." So came into being "the horrible and destructive 

 monsters, these caricatures and distortions of creation," of which we 

 have fossil remains. Dr. Westermeyer goes on to insist that "whole 

 generations called into existence by God succumbed to the corruption 

 of the Devil, and for that reason had to be destroyed"; and that 



■f See Gosso^ " Omphalos," London, 1857, p. 5, and passim ; and for a passage giving 

 the key-note of the whole, with a most farcical note on coprolitcs, sec pp. 353, 354. 



