CARL VON LINNE AS A GEOLOGIST ISTATHORST. 713 



opment of geological science, was that fossils represented beings that 

 had perished in the " deluge." Linne, hoAvever, did not share this 

 opinion, and, as we shall find later, put himself on record more than 

 once as opposed to it. It does not appear that he doubted the biblical 

 version of the great flood, but that he believed it had taken place 

 before the continents had reached their present magnitude. This 

 view was advanced in his lecture on the growth of the habitable 

 globe, an address delivered in 1743 at the conferring of the degrees 

 of doctor of medicine at Upsala : * * * 



* * * From all this I believe I may safely draw the conclusion that the 

 portion of the land above the surface of the sea is yearly increasing; on the 

 other hand, that it was formerly much smaller, and that in the beginning it 

 was merely a tiny island, upon which, as though in concentrated form, was to 

 be found everything that the all-bountiful Creator had destined to be of use 

 to mankind. * * * 



Is it credible that the Creator of the world should fill the earth with animals 

 only to destroy them all shortly afterwards through a deluge, with the excep- 

 tion of a single pair of each species, preserved in the Ark? * * * 



******* 



Although Linne had entirely emancipated himself from the pre- 

 vailing opinion as to the connection of the " deluge " with the for- 

 mation of the soil and the stratified rocks, he, in common with his 

 contemporaries, had no adequate conception of the enormous length 

 of geological time. Otherwise he could not have fixed the time for 

 the formation of the land at a period subsequent to that of the deluge. 

 It should, however, be admitted that during his journey in Skane the 

 tremendous period representing the age of the earth may at least 

 have daAvned upon his mind. This journe}^ was undertaken in 1719, 

 or six years subsequent to his lecture on the growth of the habitable 

 globe, wherefore the experience then gained could have had no pos- 

 sible influence on his discourse in 1743. Still later " Linne explained 

 his position on this subject clearly and explicitly, as follows: 



Nor should lithology be ungrateful to Linne. He was one of the first and 

 one of the most prominent to call attention to the decrease of the water and 

 the expansion of the continents, going back to the time of Paradise. He would 

 even have believed the earth to be older than the Chinese believe it to be, had 

 the Scriptures allowed it. 



******* 



Linnets idea that the growth of the continents occurred only sub- 

 sequent to the " deluge " led him to quote, as proofs of the decrease 

 of water, evidences from such widely separated periods as the Cam- 

 bro-Silurian on the one hand and the Quaternary on the other. This 

 error, which had already been committed by Swedenborg, was not 

 an unnatural one for the time, and it must not be forgotten that the 



'^Afzelius, A., " Egenhiindiga antekningar af Carl Linnaeus om sig sjelf med 

 anmarkningar och tillagg," p. 213, Upsala, 1823. 



