NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 723 



evening and a morning, and that no new species has ever ap- 

 peared since. He dwells on the production of birds from the 

 water as resting upon certain warrant of Scripture, but adds, " If 

 the question is to be argued on physical grounds, we know that 

 water is more akin to air than the earth is." As to difficulties in 

 the scriptural account of creation, he tells us that God " wished 

 by these to give proofs of his power which should fill us with 

 astonishment." 



The controlling minds in the Roman Catholic Church stead- 

 fastly held this view. In the seventeenth century Bossuet threw 

 his vast authority in its favor, and in his Discourse on Universal 

 History, which has remained the foundation not only of theological 

 but of general historical teaching in France down to the present 

 republic, we find him calling attention to what he regards as the 

 culminating act of creation, and asserting that, literally, for the 

 creation of man earth was used, and " the finger of God applied 

 to corruptible matter." 



Protestant Europe held this idea no less persistently. In the 

 seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice- Chancellor of the 

 University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his time, 

 attempted to reconcile the two accounts in Genesis by saying that 

 of the " clean sort of beasts there were seven of every kind created, 

 three couples for breeding and the odd one for Adam's sacrifice on 

 his fall, which God foresaw " ; that of unclean beasts only one 

 couple was created ; and finally, that " heaven and earth, center and 

 circumference, were created all together, in the same instant, and 

 clouds full of water," and that " this work took place and man was 

 created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B. c., at nine o'clock in 

 the morning." Here was, indeed, a triumph of Lactantius's meth- 

 od, the result of a thousand years of biblical study and theologi- 

 cal thought since Bede, in the eighth century, and Vincent de 

 Beauvais, in the thirteenth, had declared that creation must have 

 taken place in the spring. Yet, alas ! within two centuries after 

 Lightfoot's great theological demonstration as to the exact hour 

 of creation, it was discovered that at that hour an exceedingly 

 cultivated people, enjoying all the fruits of a highly developed 

 civilization, had long been swarming in the great cities of Egypt, 

 and that other nations hardly less advanced had at that time 

 reached a high development in Asia. 



So literal was this whole conception of the work of creation 

 that in these days it can scarcely be imagined. The Almighty 

 was represented in theological literature, in the illustrations of 

 Bibles, and in works of art generally, as a sort of enlarged and 

 venerable Nuremberg toymaker ; a pictorial representation in ac- 

 cordance with the well-known sacred account, showing the Crea- 

 tor in the act of sewing skins of beasts into coats for Adam and 



