278 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



Genesis might not have covered. He proposed to reconcile 

 geology not merely to the Mosaic record, but to an exact 

 and inelastic interpretation of it. 



His theory is briefly this. Life is a circle, no one 

 stage of which more than any other affords a natural 

 commencing-point. Every living object has an omphalos, 

 or an egg, or a seed, which points irresistibly to the 

 existence of a previous living object of the same kind. 

 Creation, therefore, must mean the sudden bursting into 

 the circle, and its phenomena, produced full grown by the 

 arbitrary will of God, would certainly present the stigmata 

 of a pre-existent existence. Each created tree would dis- 

 play the marks of sloughed bark and fallen leaves, though 

 it had never borne those leaves or that bark. The teeth of 

 each brute would be worn away with exercise which it had 

 never taken. By innumerable examples he shows that this 

 must have been the case with all living forms. If so, then 

 why may not the fossils themselves be part of this breaking 

 into the circle ? Why may not the strata, with their buried 

 fauna and flora, belong to the general scheme of the 

 prochronic development of the plan of the life-history of 

 this globe? The ingenuity of this idea is great, and if 

 once we believe in the literal act of creation, it is very hard 

 to escape from the reasoning that leads up to it. It was an 

 example of the looseness of thought habitual to the 

 majority of readers that those who desired to hold the 

 orthodox view were unable to see that they were on the 

 horns of a dilemma in rejecting my father's theory. What 

 Omphalos really proved was the absolute necessity for some 

 other definite hypothesis of the mode in which the world 

 came into existence than any which assumed the tradi- 

 tional idea of a sudden creative act. 



It was the notion that the world was created with fossil 

 skeletons in its crust which met with most ridicule from 



