262 A PATCHWORK CREATION. CHAP. xvn. 



preserved. They rather allow that not a tithe, not a 

 fractional part, has been petrified and preserved. And 

 how do they know that this earth had not once a habit- 

 able surface capable of accommodating the whole of 

 them ? all that has become extinct, and all that still 

 survives ? . . . I have not the least doubt that had Sir 

 Charles (Lyell), Sir Roderick (Murchison), Agassiz, or 

 Hugh Miller, taken a fancy to work out the notion, they 

 might have given us a habitable surface capable of 

 accommodating all that lives with all that is extinct, 

 and thus saved us the necessity of swallowing that, to 

 me at least, unpalatable thing, a patchwork creation a 

 system of odds and ends, of clippings and parings. I 

 cannot believe that this earth ever saw a creation but 

 one. Much has become extinct I allow, but much is 

 supposed to be extinct which is not extinct. 



" I grant that chronology is corrupt. I grant that the 

 earth is much older than was at one time thought ; and 

 that our habitable surface was not made in a day, or in 

 a week, or by a word ; but I cannot accept the order ot 

 creation that geologists have carved out for me. The 

 arguments of geologists, like disturbed strata, have a 

 peculiar dip, and a strike, by which you can easily dis- 

 tinguish the school of the reasoner. 



"And what means all this palaver? I am simply 

 provoked by the old monkish trick of reading backwards 

 instead of forwards. This is a land of liberty, and I 

 nvail myself of the privilege of resting and waiting for 

 further light." 



Such were Dick's views at the beginning of 1854 



