112 The American Geologist. February, 1892 
demonstrate to the world that a doctrine which had been denounced 
as heresy is sustained not only by ethnology, archeology, 
chronology and biology, but by the Bibleitself. Notwithstanding 
prolonged absences from home on lecture engagements which 
took him as far west as lowa and Nebraska, he completed the 
manuscript by May, 1879. The work appeared in April, 1880, 
from the publishing house of 8. C. Griggs & Co., Chicago. The 
following is from its preface: 
I have not assumed a position hostile to the Bible: it would have been 
irrational for me to do so; since it is the assertion of the Bible which de- 
termines what we are to understand by Adam. Had the Bible affirmed 
explicitly that Adam had no progenitor, I!should simply have declared the 
facts of the genesiacal history inconsistent with the affirmation, as the 
facts of science would also be. I have even devoted a chapter to the 
proof that Preadamitism is neither inconsistent with the Bible nor with 
the orthodoxy of approved divines. More particularly, have not disputed 
the divine creation of Adam, even in maintaining that he hada human 
father and mother. I have not impaired the unity of mankind, but have 
removed the incredibility of that doctrine as grounded in the descent of 
negroes and Australians from Noah and Adam. I have not aflirmed—even 
like McCausland and other ecclesiastical poly genists—that mankind, one 
in moral nature, are not one in origin: since I hold that the blood of the 
first human stock flows in the veins of every living human being. I have 
not excluded the Preadamites and their descendents froth the benefits of 
the “Plan of Redemption; since I maintain that all mankind are equally 
the subjects of redemption. I have not degraded Adam below the 
level on which the Bible places him, since I do not recognize him as the 
starting point of humanity. Finally I have not pictured man as risen 
from the organic grade of a brute since I wished only to show that he 
was in existence before the “first man” of the Hebrews. 
1879. He lectured at Potsdam, N. Y., in May, 1879, under the 
auspices of the Normal School. He had delivered a popular lec- 
ture there the autumn previous. | Returning home he first wrote 
an article on the Metaphysics of Scfence, requested by the editor 
of the ‘‘North American Review,” which appeared in the No. for 
January, 1880, and returned to the completion, or at least the 
farther prosecution of his great work —grievously interrupted 
however from day to day by the varied calls which exhaust the 
energy and steal the time of a professional man. 
In June, 1879, he was unanimously recalled by the Board of 
Regents of the University of Michigan to the chair of geology and 
paleontology in that institution. For several years such had been 
the intensity of a factional spirit in the Board, that scarcely any 
. 
- 
