108 HAECKEL 



that the forests grew which we find fossilised in our 

 coal. In another the ichthyosauri, gigantic lizards, 

 filled the ocean. In a third the hideous mega- 

 therium dragged along its huge frame, and so on. 

 It is true that there is nothing in the Bible about 

 these ancient and extinct periods ; but the Mosaic 

 verses move quickly — they press on to come to man. 

 The repeated creations of the animal and plant 

 worlds are summed up in a single one. We must 

 read something between the lines. 



Apart from that, everything is clear. Hence 

 the ancient species were made fixed, solid, and 

 unchangeable by God just like the later species 

 that Adam found in Paradise, and that still exist. 

 Without the will of God they could no more have 

 died out than the actual ones ; and there were no 

 human beings there to destroy them. But the 

 divine action intervened. At the end of each of 

 these old-world periods a terrible spectacle 

 was witnessed. The heavens poured out their 

 punishing floods ; the seas were heated to steam 

 by fiery masses of rock that were summoned by the 

 divine power from the bowels of the earth. In 

 the course of a single day the carboniferous forests 

 were swallowed up; the megatheria disappeared, 

 legs uppermost, like flies in butter, in the sand 

 dunes of the terrible floods. 



The might of the creative act was equalled by 

 the might of the destruction. The science of these 

 vast new creations and divine revolutions before 

 Adam's birth was called geology. It lived in peace 

 with Linne's theory of fixed species. Its parent, 



( 



