On the Mosaic account of the Creation. 373 



misguided zeal, and desire to overthrow the theories of the 

 rival sect, have betrayed them. 



The mineral geologist cannot strictly adhere to the Mosaic 

 narrative, because, as he avers, he finds no revolution men- 

 tioned, by which he could satisfactorily account for the 

 numerous fossil exuviae of marine animals which are imbed- 

 ded in a series of strata, to the deposition of which he justly 

 declares the Deluge could undoubtedly have been in no wise 

 instrumental, namely, in the secondary formations. Not per- 

 ceiving the period when these animals became extinct, al- 

 though clearly mentioned in the Bible ; and finding the first 

 revolution of geologists to be totally insufficient to account 

 for such phenomena, the mineral geologist at once decides 

 that other revolutions must have taken place, and he therefore 

 proceeds to build up a theory according to his own ingenuity 

 and fancy. 



The Mosaic geologist being likewise culpably blind to the 

 true period of the first revolution, as assigned by the sacred 

 historian, most unaccountably and unjustifiably persists in 

 referring it to the events of the third creative day, that is, to 

 the separation of land and sea, and then immediately proceeds 

 to contradict himself, and upset his own theory, by referring 

 to that miscalled revolution, the formation of coal, which he 

 acknowledges to be a vegetable deposit, although the very 

 record which he is advocating, distinctly declares to him that 

 the separation of land and sea was completed before the 

 vegetable world was called into existence.* From this false 

 position he is again led into error with regard to the fossil 

 exuviae of the secondary strata, because insisting that Moses 

 allows but of two revolutions, he is necessarily constrained 

 to refer the exuviae of all animals both of the secondary and 

 tertiary deposits to the one catastrophe of the Deluge, which 

 is clearly inadequate to the production of both these forma- 



* See passim " Perm's Comparative Estimates of Mineral and Mosaical 

 Geology," and " Fairholme's Scripture Geology." 



3 c 



