Father Laurent gives his name on his title page as the age gave it: Father Laurent, Provincial of the Capuchin Friars Minor, Member of the Geological Society of France. The approbation that opens the book, granted at Rome in April 1863 by Brother Nicholas of St. John, Minister General of the whole order, calls him Provincial of the Capuchin Friars Minor of France.
He wrote as a naturalist among naturalists. The question that occupied him was the one that divided Catholic writers of his century: whether the six days of Genesis must be read as ages, to make room for the geological record, or whether they are days, and the record is to be read another way. He argued for the days, and marshalled against the ages a geologist’s objections, a philologist’s reading of Moses as a historian rather than a poet, and a long muster of the Fathers, the theologians and the modern commentators.
His Geological, Philological, and Scriptural Studies on the Cosmogony of Moses (Paris, 1863) is offered here complete, in English for the first time, with the appendix he added while the book was in the press, reporting the debate at the Paris academies over the fossil jaw of Moulin-Quignon. Cardinal Mazzella cites the book in his own treatise on God the Creator, which this library also holds.