264 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



asking and answering the question whether his scientific beliefs 

 were in harmony with that revelation. He published in 1856 a 

 scheme of reconciliation of Genesis and geology, 1 for whose main 

 outlines he acknowledged indebtedness to Professor Arnold Guyot. 

 He further expounded the scheme with much learning and inge- 

 nuity in several later publications, and seems to have retained his 

 faith in it to the end of his life. It was one of the schemes of recon- 

 ciliation in which the "days" of the first chapter of Genesis are 

 regarded as symbolic of indefinite periods. We need not in this 

 connection take time for its discussion. All these schemes of 

 , reconciliation belong to an obsolescent stage of religious thought. 

 I Intelligent and progressive theologians to-day generally believe 

 \ that the reconciliation of scientific theories and Hebrew traditions 

 J is as unnecessary as it is impossible, and that Christian faith is in 

 ) no wise dependent upon the scientific accuracy of Genesis or the 

 j inerrancy of Scripture in general. 



So long as science is progressive, the study of the works even of 

 the greatest scientists must be largely a study of errors. Already 

 we have outgrown some of the geological views which Professor 

 Dana held to the end of his life, and which find expression even in 

 the latest edition of the Manual; as, for instance, on the origin of 

 many of the gneissoid rocks, the extent of climatic oscillations in 

 the Glacial period, the conditions of the rivers during the forma- 

 tion of post-Glacial terraces, the relations of the igneous to the 

 sedimentary rocks in the Trias of Connecticut and New Jersey. 

 But, when we consider the number and importance of the fruitful 

 ideas in geological science of which we owe to Dana the origina- 

 tion or the elaboration, and the breadth of view and the judicial 

 temper and the just sense of perspective which gave to the System 

 of Mineralogy and the Manual of Geology a character so authori- 

 tative, we shall feel like assenting to the words of Professor John 

 W. Judd, in a letter to Professor E. S. Dana on the occasion of his 

 father's death: "Geologists and mineralogists all over the world 

 will feel that the greatest of all the masters of our science has 

 now passed away." 



1 Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. 13, pp. 110-129. 



