INTRODUCTION. 29 



years, until the moist and fertile superficial layer was dried by 

 the heat of the sun, and began to rend and crack. The waters 

 below became heated, vapours rose, and bursting through the 

 fertile layer, came into contact with the atmosphere. The 

 intermingling of air and vapour produced fearful storms of 

 thunder and lightning and torrential rains. 



The superficial layer broke in many places, and portions of 

 it sank into the earth's abysses. As they fell, some parts were 

 crushed, and tumbled in disorder above one another, so that 

 they formed mountains, valleys, and islands. This was the 

 period of the great Deluge, during which plants and living 

 creatures were almost all destroyed. As the floods retreated 

 the present state of our earth was initiated, but it also will one 

 day pass away in a universal conflagration. Then will succeed 

 a second Chaos from which the Golden Age will spring. 



Burnet's circumstantial sketch, which in no way militated 

 against Biblical evidences, excited considerable attention, and 

 won for him worldly preferment. But in a later work in 1692, 

 Burnet treated the Mosaic account of the Fall of Man as an 

 allegory, and for this heresy he was dismissed from his appoint- 

 ments at Court. 



John Woodward, 1 the collector and palaeontologist, was the I 

 most famous English representative of the religious school of 

 geologists. His Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial 

 Bodies, etc. (London, 1695), was translated into Latin by 

 Johann Scheuchzer, and had a wide circulation. In this 

 work, Woodward described his collection of fossils, minerals, 

 metals, and rock specimens. He strongly opposed the opinion \ 

 that fossils could be mere imitative sports of nature, and said 

 they represented past faunas and floras. But he supposed 

 these remains to have been carried to their present position in 

 the earth by a universal flood, the deluge of the Scriptures. 



Before the Flood, the earth's surface conformation had been 

 similar to that which we now know, and the ante-diluvial 

 forms of life on the globe had not differed materially from 

 post-diluvial forms. The earth's interior had been filled with 



1 John Woodward, born 1665, in Derbyshire, studied medicine under a 

 practical physician in Gloucester, was appointed Professor at Gresham 

 College in London in 1692, died 1722. He bequeathed his valuable 

 collection and library to the University of Cambridge. One of the most 

 violent opponents of Woodward's views was Elias Camerarius, Professor at 

 Tubingen. 



