LITERARY WORK IN DEVONSHIRE. 277 



weight that he could never throw off, and his scientific work 

 was of value only in those matters of detail which remained 

 beyond the jurisdiction of the canon. But, as I have said 

 before, if he could have been content to rest in detail, and 

 to have let the ephemeral theories of man spin themselves 

 out in gossamer and disappear ; if he could have persuaded 

 himself to endure with indifference what he regarded with 

 disdain, all might yet have been well. In 1857 evolutionism 

 was crude and vague ; a positive naturalist might well have 

 been permitted to ignore it. But, unhappily, my father's 

 conscience tortured him into protest, and he must needs 

 break a lance with the windmills of the geologists. 

 , The theory around which the illustrative chapters of 

 Omphalos were embroidered may briefly be described. The 

 pet craze of the moment was the reconciliation of Genesis 

 with geology. Most men of science at that date advocated, 

 or thought it decent to seem to advocate, some scheme or 

 other for preventing the phenomena of geological investi- 

 gation from clashing with the Mosaic record. Many of 

 them, with Adam Sedgwick, thought that " we must 

 consider the old strata of the earth as monuments of a 

 date long anterior to the existence of man, and to the 

 times contemplated in the moral records of his creation." 

 Very few were, in 1857, prepared to part company alto- 

 gether with the cosmogony of Genesis. They preferred to 

 evade the actual language, to escape into such generalities 

 as " the six ages of creation," " an antecedent state of the 

 earth prior to the recorded Mosaical epoch." It was to a 

 generation not as yet revolutionized or emboldened by 

 Darwin and Colenso that my father addressed his 

 Omphalos ; he took for granted that his readers were sure 

 of the fact of creation. He undertook to show them that 

 the contents of the fossiliferous strata did not prove any 

 process of cosmic formation which the six literal days of 



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