After having examined with serious attention the works of the authors cited, in order to ascertain their opposition to the literal interpretation of the days of Moses, we found in all of them the same arguments, the same difficulties, the same solutions, which we believe we can summarize in the following manner. All have reasoned thus: The account of Moses, which creates the universe and organizes it in six days, is entirely incompatible with the best-attested fundamental facts of geology; therefore these days cannot be taken for ordinary days of twenty-four hours; they evidently signify periods, epochs, indefinite intervals.
Let us now see what these scientific facts are which reject the literal sense.
They are, it appears:
1. The formation of rocks, and especially of sedimentary rocks and mountains.
Beneath all the sedimentary rocks of which the solid crust of the earth is composed, one finds the crystalline rocks known by the name of granite in its various species, ordinarily amorphous, sometimes foliated; this is what is called the primitive ground, beyond which no one has yet penetrated, and upon which rise the strata commonly called primary, secondary, tertiary, etc., with their various subdivisions. They are formed of sand, clay, limestone, coal, chalk, and gypsum, and merge into the surface layers of vegetable earth. These strata, which present layers heterogeneous to one another, and enclose within themselves innumerable remains of animals and plants, are assuredly sedimentary materials; they are deposits formed within a liquid; and if their thickness is compared with what analogous causes produce in the present physical order, one is forced to admit that a considerable span of time elapsed during their formation.
Moreover, one observes that these various formations were overturned by violent commotions. They bristle with irregularities: some have
parallel faces; others are composed of beds, sometimes horizontal, sometimes oblique; elsewhere, they are seen in a vertical position. Now, it is beyond doubt that these rocks were not formed in this position; their beds were horizontal in the beginning; cataclysms of inappreciable power must have bent and raised them upright.
The immense time necessarily required for their formation, and the great subsequent revolutions which these deposits underwent, are entirely incompatible with the six days of Moses.
2. The presence of fossils.
Beginning with the strata that constitute the primitive ground, one finds in all the others which are superimposed in the universal series an innumerable quantity of vegetable products and remains of animals of every kind. These various layers therefore served successively as a support for different creations, vegetable and animal, which succeeded one another upon the globe, and which, after having occupied its surface for an unknown time, were destroyed and engulfed by immense revolutions. The epochs which separated these various creations are clearly demarcated, since in each stratum one finds almost only fossils of the same genus and of different species; and the duration of each of these epochs, which coincides with that of the geological formations, must have been immense, although its extent cannot be specified.
3. The formation of coals.
The formations of coal and anthracite necessarily required an enormously long time, whether they are considered as vast masses of plants gathered in one place by great currents, or whether they are regarded as forests buried in place. In this hypothesis, after each new irruption of the sea, the forests had to be allowed time to spring up again and to develop. The number of coal beds, which varies from forty to eighty, and their thickness, which reaches as much as fifteen, eighteen metres, separated by other mineral strata, required the repetition of the same phenomenon at long intervals, and cannot be reconciled with the time so restricted indicated by the account of Moses.
4. The absence of human fossils.
The absence of fossil human bones is the most serious of all the difficulties, the strongest of all the proofs. Indeed, does not this absence of every human vestige and of every object betraying the hand of man, amid the innumerable fossils of animals and plants spread throughout all the formations of the globe, seem to demonstrate that man did not exist simultaneously with these animals and these plants? Is it not evident that, if he had been created at the same time as all those beings whose remains we discover, he could not have survived the revolutions which carried them away, and that he
would have been buried in a common destruction with the animals and the plants?
We believe we can neglect some other arguments of the proponents of the periods, among others that of certain astronomers who claim that the light of certain stars can reach us only after thousands and thousands of years, by reason of the immeasurable distance which separates them from our planet. Science has disposed of these claims by establishing the impossibility of a serious verification of these calculations. We know, indeed, neither the density nor the extent of the atmosphere through which light travels in the spaces; we are equally ignorant of the speed with which light traverses them, and nothing authorizes us to maintain that no particular action is exerted there whose influence, here below, despite all our telescopes, we do not even suspect. And consequently, are we not reduced in this regard to conjectures and suppositions more or less plausible, but always hazardous?