Chapter III: Reply to These Objections

In approaching the question of the time required for the formation of those masses of sedimentary materials which are called mountains, and for the accumulation within them of so many remains of animals and plants which are mingled with their layers, we do not claim to fix it, or to determine it rigorously. To tell the truth, this is nevertheless a task which those who first raised the question should have undertaken, when they began from it to elaborate all the systems of epochs and revolutions of which we have spoken. We shall confine ourselves first of all to pointing out the strange paralogism into which they have fallen in claiming to unfold the sequence and, in some fashion, to describe the filiation of ancient geological phenomena. According to their own ideas, these phenomena were necessarily the product of diverse causes which must have acted diversely according to their intensity, their duration, and the medium in which they acted, and which, as we shall have occasion to observe many times, could not have acted as they act today. There can therefore be, among these effects of the same causes acting at different epochs and under different conditions, no certain parity, and still less any rigorous observations or mathematical calculations. To many arguments of our opponents one could oppose this philosophical plea of inadmissibility, of which it would be fitting for them to take account, for philosophy has its word to say everywhere; and even here it is not unseemly to consult it. We shall see later, in various places, to what extravagant consequences this claim to substitute, in the history of creation, the perpetual and almost indefinite action of secondary causes for the unique and sovereign action of the first cause—that is to say, the almighty will of God—would lead.

For the present, we propose only to demonstrate that, without losing oneself in the incalculable periods into which the proponents of the systems we are combating wish to draw us, one can explain the accomplishment of geological phenomena while keeping within the time known and determined by the Bible. We shall take as our guides in the exposition of these matters, in that which is scientific about them,

the competent writers who have made a particular study of them: Messrs. Buffon, Constant Prévot, Blainville, Boubée, Maupied, Soriguet, etc.

1. Formation of mountains.

We shall not speak of the primitive, that is to say granitic, strata. It is well recognized that the earth was created directly by divine power, and that consequently it could have been created only with all the conditions necessary for the existence of the beings that were to inhabit it, that is to say, with mountains, rivers, plains, valleys, streams, and vegetable earth: from the heights of his dwelling, God waters the mountains: Rigans montes de superioribus suis [Watering the mountains from his upper regions].¹ The mountains bounded like the ram, and the hills like the lamb: Montes exultaverunt ut arietes, et colles sicut agni ovium [The mountains leapt like rams, and the hills like lambs of sheep].² We shall concern ourselves only with the sedimentary strata, composed of calcareous and siliceous substances, of deep-sea and shore layers, and of remains of dislocations or uplifts.

A threefold provenance is assigned to calcareous rocks: the first, to the limestone of the primitive rocks, which, according to several geologists, must have contained it, although others have denied this; the second, to thermal springs, which become saturated with the lime of the primitive rocks through which they pass; the third, finally, and the principal one, to the accumulation of two

species of animals, the mollusks and the radiates. Now, how much time was required for the production of these colossal layers of limestone which form the greater part of the crust of the globe?

Buffon resolves the problem in part by attributing them to mollusks: “The body of shell-bearing animals,” he says, “while nourishing itself upon the particles of the water, at the same time works upon its substance to the point of denaturing it. The shell is certainly a terrestrial substance, a true stone, from which all the parts that chemists call calcareous, and several other materials, derive their origin. This shell appears, in truth, to form a constituent part of the animal that it covers, since it perpetuates itself through generation, and since they are seen in the little mollusks which have just been born as in those which have attained their full growth; but it is nonetheless a terrestrial substance formed by the secretions of the animal’s body. It is seen to enlarge and thicken by rings and by layers as the animal grows, and often this stony material exceeds by fifty or sixty times the mass, or real material, of the body of the animal that produces it. Let one represent to oneself for an instant the number of species of these shell-bearing animals: they are perhaps more numerous in the seas than the species of insects are upon the earth; let one then represent to oneself their rapid growth, their prodigious multiplication, the short

duration of their life, whose average term we shall suppose to be ten years; let one then consider that the number of all the individuals of this genus must be multiplied by fifty or sixty in order to form an idea of all the stony material produced in ten years; and finally, let one consider that this already so large block of stony material must be increased by as many similar blocks as there are ten-year periods in all the centuries that have elapsed since the beginning of the world, and one will become familiar with this idea, or rather with this truth that is repellent at first, that all our hills, all our rocks of limestone, marble, chalk, etc., originally come only from the remains of these little animals.”³

To the limestone formed by mollusks must be joined the limestone produced by polyps or madrepores. Here is what we read in the British Review: “I have seen,” says Dalrymphe in his Researches on the Formation of Islands, “coral banks of every kind; some entirely under water at greater or lesser depths; others rising above the surface of the sea by the points of a few rocks; several beginning to assume the aspect of an island, but still without the slightest appearance of vegetation; I have likewise observed a great number whose summits were already becoming carpeted with wild grasses; and others, finally, where superb trees were growing,

covered by the richest vegetation, while at a pistol-shot’s distance from the island the bottom of the sea could have been found. Torres Strait is almost obstructed by similar islands, and by others whose formation is more or less advanced. The time will come when New Holland, New Guinea, and all those numerous groups of islets to the north and northeast will form only a single immense continent.”

“Let us now imagine that one of these immense coral banks is raised by a submarine volcano and converted into a chain of mountains, forming islands or continents: most of the phenomena presented by calcareous mountains would be found there.”⁴

By combining these two products, it has been found, through an approximate calculation based upon the number of these animals and upon the quantity of limestone that each individual can furnish, that in only two thousand years this quantity would cover the surface of the whole earth with a layer of limestone more than one hundred metres thick; and since these layers are not uniform, some might have a thickness of one thousand metres, while others would have only one hundred and even less. And if the same calculation is made, not for the span of two thousand years, but for that of seven to eight thousand, which is the duration of the world

according to the Septuagint, one will obtain calcareous formations greater even than those of the different strata. Mr. Boubée informs us, indeed, that in Germany, where the geological formations appear thicker than in England and France, the thickness of all the secondary strata combined, which are the thickest of the entire series, scarcely exceeds three thousand metres.

Independently of these prodigious masses of limestone produced by animals, account must also be taken of transported materials, that is to say, the limestones, sands, clays, and marls which the rivers carry each day and deposit in their raw state at the bottom of the seas. To form an idea of this, one must recall that, according to the observations made upon rivers, it has been established that for thirty-three cubic metres of water they carry from ten to fifteen cubic metres of sediment. Thus, the Ganges carries fifteen hundred cubic metres of sediment to the sea per hour; which, counting only three months per year for the period of transport, which is not continuous, gives in six thousand years more than thirty-three billion cubic metres of sediment. Likewise, at a certain epoch of the year, the Seine causes ten million cubic metres of water, and seven to eight hundred cubic metres of sedimentary materials, to pass in twenty-four hours beneath the Pont-Royal in Paris.

These considerations suffice to prove the possibility of the formation of our mountains during the

historical time fixed by Moses since creation, without having recourse to the hypothesis of unlimited epochs.

2. Presence of fossils.

It is to fossils, we have said, that the birth of all the theories of which we have spoken, and of a multitude of others, is due. It is probable that, without those organic remains whose origin and formation no one knew how to explain, no one would ever have thought of epochs, or of a pre-Genesis world.

In order to dispose of this difficulty, it suffices to understand clearly the phenomena of fossilization. We have before our eyes a geological operation which presents great analogies with it: petrification. It consists in mineral molecules infiltrating the voids of organic tissues, filling all their interstices, and taking the form of the tissues which, gradually disappearing, leave to the new agglomeration the appearance and the likeness of the organized and subsequently transformed body. Carbonate, sulfate of lime, silica above all, and oxidized iron infiltrate and appear frequently in various organized substances. Fossilization takes place, with a few differences, in the same manner, sometimes preserving the hard parts of animals and plants in their natural state or with little alteration, sometimes transmitting only more or less coarse molds, surfaces, envelopes, or impressions of the configuration of the bodies which have thus been more or less profoundly modified

by other materials. But this operation presents this particular circumstance: it can be accomplished only beneath the waters, and these waters hold mineral substances in suspension, carry them, and deposit them. Now, how much time does this phenomenon, which escapes all appraisal because it takes place in the waters, require for its completion? No one could say. But what can be affirmed with certainty is that the long epochs invented to explain it are not necessary, since this phenomenon of ancient times is still reproduced in the present time.

Among the fossil deposits made within human memory are cited the fossiliferous layers of living species observed in France in the department of Calvados, in England, Sicily, Sweden, Norway, Guadeloupe, and several islands of the Antilles archipelago. All these layers are regular, horizontal, stratiform; their organic materials do not differ at all, as fossils, from those of the more ancient strata; and if they came to decompose and disappear from their matrix, they would leave there, for future generations, molds, impressions, and traces of their existence, just as the fossil beings of earlier periods have done.

Other fossiliferous rocks, likewise horizontal and stratiform, are at this very day in the process of formation. Thus, in the newly

dried-up lake of Bakic in Scotland, rocks formed within human memory are cited; and in other places one sees rocks which are still continuing to form at the present time, and which present, cemented and agglomerated by silica and carbonate of lime, a great number of mollusks with stems and plants of Chara identical to the living species found in the same locality.

Finally, Mr. Agassiz established that one of the fossil fish which is seen forming every day on the coasts of Iceland, in a bluish mud which hardens easily in the air, was identical to that of a living species which he calls Mallotus villosus. The banks of the Seine, in the vicinity of Paris, likewise present a marly deposit which increases every day, and which is filled with univalve shells that live in the waters of that river.

Thus, it remains well demonstrated that fossils could have been formed since the Mosaic creation, since they are still formed every day.

3. Formation of coals.

The argument drawn from the formation of coals in favor of the periods proceeds from certain errors put forward by the celebrated Cuvier and adopted by a great number of geologists.

He claimed that the vegetation of the present world had preluded its successive development with the simplest organization, that is to say, with that of acotyledonous and monocotyledonous plants—ferns,

palms, reeds—and that it was little by little, gradually, after long intervals of centuries and frightful cataclysms, that it had succeeded in producing polycotyledonous plants. But skillful chemists, Messrs. Williams, Nicol, and Witham, having subjected the plants of the coals to microscopic examination, recognized that the organization of the plants buried in these deposits, far from being simple, is as complicated as that of the plants of the present world: which overturns from top to bottom the doctrine of the progressive development of organized beings, and, with it, the hypothesis of various creations that one was forced to deduce from it. They found in several coal mines that the mass of the combustible is composed not only of acotyledonous and monocotyledonous plants, but of arborescent polycotyledonous plants, whose organization is the most complicated.

A second error is to suppose that these fossil plants lived in the very places where their remains are found. In other terms, coal is attributed to forests buried beneath the waters by invasions of the sea and covered by its deposits. But first, the carbonaceous layers are not always in contact with marine layers, as they ought to be under this supposition. They are much more often covered by freshwater sandstones and clays, as is proved by the fossils enclosed in these rocks.

Secondly, in certain basins there have been counted

as many as thirty or forty carboniferous layers, separated by deposits of sandstone, clay, and limestone; it would therefore be necessary to admit as many invasions of the sea as there are layers. It would be necessary to admit that, after the withdrawal of the waters which had submerged the first forest, a new forest, formed of the same species of plants, developed precisely above the site of the old one, while awaiting another irruption of the ocean that would come to destroy it; and this alternation would have been repeated forty times, always under the same conditions. In truth, all this is strange, incredible, impossible; and one experiences much less embarrassment in taking quite simply the account of Moses for a historical account whose every detail it is not wise to wish to explain, seeing that the data are lacking to us.

Thirdly, the position of the plants in coal mines suffices to demonstrate the falsity of this hypothesis. They are placed horizontally and assume a stratified form. All the carbonaceous rocks—coals, anthracites, lignites—assume this disposition. This twofold condition suffices to demonstrate that the plants were transported; every stratified rock presupposes transport. And since these various rocks present only plants of terrestrial and fluviatile species, one must conclude that they were carried by continental torrents and not by the sea.

It is objected that tree stems have been found in certain coal mines in a vertical position, such as they must have been during their life. But it has been observed that these stems themselves were truncated at their lower end, that they have no roots, and that in reality they are only broken, rounded trunks, without branches and without soil above which they could have grown. Now, if they had been buried in place, they would not have lost their roots, their branches, and their productive soil. Thus, the difficulty which these vertical stems, few in number besides, seem to present remains without importance.

But, it is said, what considerable time must have been required for these plants to be transformed into rocks, and for the solidification of these rocks!

It is known today that this transformation, this solidification, is due to several causes: to the compression of the upper layers of the globe; to the addition of a siliciferous or calcariferous cement effected by gases and materials of effusion; to the bitumen contained in coal; and even to electrochemical actions. As for the time necessary for the accumulation of all these plants and the accomplishment of the phenomena, what is taking place at present in America and Holland can give us an idea of it, and proves that historical time would have been more than sufficient. Here are calculations which we borrow from Mr. Maupied, and which can cast a great light upon this question.

“Everyone knows that, at the present time, the great rivers, and principally those of South America, carry an immense quantity of wood and marsh plants which they transport to the sea. It is said that more than eight thousand cubic feet of vegetable matter pass in a few hours at one of the mouths of the Mississippi. Now, taking as a basis the most disadvantageous calculations, those proposed by the proponents of indefinite periods and which apply to wood reduced to coal, one finds that the coal deposits represent only twenty-two hundredths of the original volume of the wood that produced them. If, therefore, it is supposed that eight thousand cubic feet of vegetable matter pass in twelve hours at one of the mouths of the Mississippi, this gives us sixteen thousand cubic feet in twenty-four hours, and in three months, one million four hundred thousand cubic feet, which, converted into coal, would furnish only a fifth of this volume, that is to say, nearly three hundred thousand cubic feet: such a layer of coal would already be quite considerable. But if this is repeated at the five mouths of the Mississippi, then the calculation is quintupled; and if these phenomena continue for only five hundred years, one will have a mass of coal of one hundred seventy-six million cubic feet. Now, let these same phenomena have been accomplished at fifty or sixty different points of the globe, where great forests were traversed

by great rivers flowing either to the sea or into lakes, and there you have sixty coalfields which would not have required more than five hundred years to form.⁵”

The peats of Holland also give us instructive information. There, as elsewhere, they are formed by the decomposition of the plants which grow in marshy regions. In removing the peat in order to use it, one digs a more or less extensive ditch into which the water enters or is brought. At first there are produced in it confervae, mosses, lichens, etc.; all these plants accumulate and decompose, and at the end of ten years one has a new peat which is exploitable.

Now, if one admits, as for the coalfields, the simultaneous action of the elevation of the temperature, the compression of the layers, siliciferous or calcariferous materials of effusion, and, finally, electrochemical influences, one understands that a long span of time would not be necessary to make these vegetable deposits pass from the peaty state to the state of coal.

Thus, the formation of the coalfields cannot furnish any support to the system of periods.

4. Absence of human fossils.

The supposed absence of every human vestige in the sedimentary rocks was first pointed out by Mr. Buckland in a chapter of

his work entitled Supposed Examples of Fossil Human Bones, examples alleged as a confirmation of the hypothesis according to which the animals whose remains we discover lived and perished before the creation of man.

This argument, which was believed peremptory, was repeated by the Geological Congress held at Chambéry in 1844 as a proof allowing no reply in favor of the periods.

“Geological times preceded the creation of man,⁶ and consequently also the chronology of Moses, which begins only at Adam.⁷ These ancient revolutions must have buried at different depths the plants and animals which then already existed; man could not have been their victim, since he had not been created. Indeed, in digging into the bowels of the earth, one finds there remains of plants and animals in abundance, never human bones.⁸”

Since that time, this assertion has already received numerous refutations. Indeed, human bones have been found in all the strata called

ancient transported deposits, in osseous breccias, in bone caverns, and in shelly breccias.

Messrs. Marcel de Serres, Tournal, and de Cristolles found some in the caverns of Bèze (Aude), Pondres and Sauviguargues (Gard), and Argon (Pyrénées-Orientales), where they are mingled and confused with the remains of mammals whose lost species are no longer seen in the animal kingdom of our age. Fragments of contemporary pottery accompany them. Bones and fragments of horn, manifestly fashioned by the hand of man, were also discovered there, likewise mingled with the remains of rhinoceroses, fossil hyenas, etc., as well as a human skull belonging to the Ethiopian or African race.⁹ Finally, according to Mr. Marcel de Serres, certain of these mammalian bones belong to species which manifestly underwent the influence of domestication.¹⁰

It would be easy for us to multiply the examples. Those which we have cited suffice to demonstrate that human fossils exist, and that they are encountered with animals which no longer exist and which had been regarded as belonging to another creation.

It had furthermore been admitted that the arrival of man upon the earth had coincided with the end of the last epoch, that is to say, with the end of Cuvier’s diluvium,

and that he had existed nowhere before then, because this formation contained nothing that established his presence.

It must be admitted that such a conclusion is far from rigorous and scientific. But then human bones, discovered even in this diluvium, came to contradict these assertions. The Marquis de Vibraye found in the grotto of Arcy a fossilized human jaw in a bed of Cuvier’s diluvium.

This is not all: a learned antiquarian of Picardy, Baron de Perthes, was to make a discovery of quite another significance. We mean the flint axes which he found in the strata that Brongniart named clysmian.

This fact presents, whether in its nature or because of the circumstances which accompanied its discovery, so great an interest—above all for the question which occupies us—that our readers will permit us to fix their attention upon it at some length.

The clysmian strata are composed of alternating layers of clay, sand, rolled flint, and chalk, and ordinarily rest upon the Cretaceous stratum. This peculiarity of position between the plastic clays and the white chalk has led certain geologists to confuse them with the Tertiary strata to which they are intimately connected. The beds of these strata in which Baron de Perthes made this valuable discovery are found at Manchecourt, a small

village situated at the gates of Abbeville: one sees there a section cut perpendicularly, nine to ten meters in height, presenting various layers in the following order: at the surface, black vegetable earth, humus; then come successively beds of clay, sand, loam, rolled and broken flint, and gray and white sand. It is in this sand that the worked flints were found; finally, there is a last bed of rolled and broken flint which rests immediately upon the white chalk.¹¹

Moved by a legitimate interest, we wished to visit these strata, which we recognized to be such as they had been described to us, and in which we were able to gather some of these flints by extracting them from their matrix.

Scarcely had this discovery become known when it threw all the academies into commotion and aroused, by its strangeness, by its characteristics, and by its consequences, a general repulsion, an incredulity which lasted several years. Some claimed that it was impossible; others treated it as absurd and denounced Baron de Perthes’s assertions as a scientific heresy, as an outrage done to science, as the aberration of a little-cultivated mind, as a chimera, as a fable. The most moderate regarded these flints as mere sports of nature, which often gives to certain productions

forms like those of an object worked by the hand of man.

“Finally,” says the conscientious scholar in his report, “they did not doubt my good faith, but they suspected my good sense.”

His perseverance nevertheless ended by triumphing over all these difficulties. His repeated affirmations, supported by the most convincing proofs, forced his adversaries to go to the place in order to examine, under all its aspects, this high question.

The most distinguished members of the Geological Society of London—Messrs. Lyell, Evans, and Prestwich—were the first visitors. After the most minute and attentive verifications, they saw what Baron de Perthes had seen and found what he had found, namely, that these axes were really the work of men; that the stratum in which they were found was indeed the one which had been indicated; that its layers could not have been disturbed since they had been deposited by some current or other; and, finally, that these flints could not have been introduced there by workmen.

Following these excursions, Mr. Prestwich made a report to the Royal Society of England in which he expressed himself thus:

“The non-existence of man upon the earth until after the last geological changes, and the extinction of the mammoths as well as of the other gigantic mammals, were regarded as a manifest thing and an established fact. But now this

article of faith of science must be revised, for here are instruments fashioned by human hands discovered in the depths of the globe.”

Then he summarizes his work by saying:

1. The flint instruments found near Abbeville are the work of man;

2. These instruments were found in virgin strata;

3. They are joined there with the remains of extinct races;

4. This period was one of the last of geological times and anterior to the time when the surface of the earth had received its present configuration.¹²

To the names of the English scholars who visited the quarries of Menchicourt several times must be added those of the French scholars who likewise went there and brought away the same convictions. We shall cite, among others, Messrs. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Albert Gaudry.

The latter, attached to the Museum of Natural History and charged with this exploration, after having excavated and analyzed the stratum and himself extracted from it several axes from the rock in which they were embedded among fossil bones, made a report to the Academy of Sciences whose conclusions are as follows:

“1. Our fathers were contemporaries of the rhinoceros tichorinus, the hippopotamus major, the elephas primigenius, the cervus semonensis, a great ox, etc., all species now destroyed;

“2. The stratum named diluvial by geologists was formed after the appearance of man.¹³”

Messrs. Pictet of Geneva and Favre, professor of geology at the Academy of that city, likewise went to Abbeville, and their conclusions were the same as the preceding ones.¹⁴

It is therefore an established, incontestable fact, raised to the authority of scientific fact, that man existed before the formation of this stratum, classed by some in the diluvium and by certain others in the Tertiary stratum, since one finds there the irrefutable proof of his presence, that is to say, the work of his hands. If the learned author of the articles of the Catholic Review, On the Origin of Things, had gone to Menchicourt, he would, like that considerable number of scholars of the first rank, have acquired the conviction that these flint axes could not, as he supposes, “have been left in trenches, cast aside, or forgotten in refilled excavations.”¹⁵

But it does not suffice to establish a fact: considered in isolation in itself, it could not offer great interest. It is its philosophy that must be studied in order to determine precisely its causes, its characteristics, and its consequences.

Why did the discovery of these worked flints so profoundly agitate men’s minds? Whence

came this universal, obstinate, instinctive repulsion against admitting it? What is the real motive for this calculated incredulity, for this disdain with which it was received? Ah! let us say it: it is because these vestiges of the presence of man, found in the bowels of the globe where the defenders of the periods had sovereignly decided that there ought not to be any, give, in Mr. Prestwich’s words, a glaring refutation to this article of their faith and, by a logical corollary, shake the foundations of all the others.

We do not conceal from ourselves how grave a thing it is, in the midst of the nineteenth century, to touch an article of the creed of the learned. Even on the part of a fact, the attempt is almost impertinent; but do we not have a certain right to rejoice at it?

What has been done for a century, above all in a certain world? The least historical or scientific discovery that seemed by its nature capable of more or less weakening the testimony of the holy books was received with favor; and after having ended by recognizing that Moses was a historian who was worth as much as another, men were delighted to establish that his language had not until now been understood, and that humanity had had to wait six thousand years before knowing how God had created the world.

Well then! since, in spite of the most formal denials, and even of the impossibility so loudly proclaimed by so many geologists, irrefutable witnesses of the existence of man have been found in the strata

of the diluvium, or Tertiary strata, it is no longer permissible to assert that they would be sought in vain in the lower strata. If, despite the long and laborious searches made in these strata and the ease of exploring them because of their position in the scale of geological formations, these works of man had until now escaped all the investigations of science, can one be surprised that, it is said, none have yet been discovered in the lower strata, which withdraw from man’s gaze and whose exploration is much more difficult?

But is it quite certain that fossil human remains have not yet been found in the other strata? Here is a remarkable fact which would seem to prove the contrary. It is reported by Paulian, author of several scientific works, a contemporary of the discovery, who lived very near the place where it was made. We read in his Dictionary of Physics, printed at Avignon in 1761 and reprinted later at Nîmes, in the article Petrification:

“A rock was blasted at Aix in Provence toward the end of the month of January 1760, and there were found in it, at a depth of five to six feet, petrified human bodies which formed one body exactly with the rock. These bodies were upright at about a foot and a half. Six heads and many bones have been preserved from them; there is one, especially, whose facial features are well marked; the others allow only the skull to be seen. The rest of the head is stone of a hardness equal to that of the hardest marble;

this part is rough like that of an ordinary stone. These six heads were turned toward the setting sun. A quantity of perfectly petrified bones of legs and thighs was removed. On some of these bones one perceives a very hard, darkened covering. The osseous parts have, in several places, preserved their whiteness; in scraping them, one removes some particles, as one does from hard plaster; and the marrow of these bones is generally crystallized.”

We sought to discover to what formation this rock belonged; all our researches were unable to attain an answer. But the uncontested authority of the author, whose cited work had the honor of several editions; the details, so numerous and so precise, into which he entered; his contemporaneity with the fact; and the proximity of the place where it was discovered scarcely permit this account to be classed among fables.

Let us further cite another fact which several newspapers have just reported and which has not yet been contradicted:

“A petrified man has just been found near Gravelly-Ford (California). The forms of the body are perfectly preserved; he is stretched out upon a rock, in the attitude of sleep; one of his legs is slightly bent, the other is a wooden leg which has also acquired the hardness of stone. When an attempt was made to move this inert mass, it was perceived that it was sealed to the rock upon which it was placed, as upon a pedestal; a sort of cement, formed by the humidity of the

air and mineral concretions, made of the man and the stone a homogeneous and inseparable block. This natural statue, which the centuries will only render more solid and more indestructible, is one of the most curious monuments that can be seen upon the earth.”

But, even admitting that the absence of human bones and works were well established, this absence could not logically prove his non-existence; it would prove only either that human bones were not found in the circumstances necessary for fossilization, or that they were carried into regions which have not yet been explored, or, again, that he did not inhabit the places where the other fossils were discovered.

Cuvier himself had drawn no other consequence from this absence:

“Everything therefore leads us to think,” he says, “that the human species did not exist in the countries where the fossil bones have been discovered at the epoch of the revolution which buried those bones. But I do not claim to conclude from this that man did not exist before that epoch. He could have inhabited a few regions of small extent, from which he afterward repopulated the earth. Perhaps also the places where he was were entirely swallowed up, and perhaps his bones are buried at the bottom of the present seas, with the exception of the small number of individuals who continued his species.”¹⁶

De la Mettrie also strongly maintained “that, supposing the absence of fossil human bones, it does not follow that man did not exist at the epoch when the fossil bones of the other animals were buried.”¹⁷

We pass over in silence several other difficulties alleged by the proponents of the periods, such as progressive creation from the simple to the compound; the marked separation between freshwater and marine-water deposits; the discordant stratification of rocks; the too great quantity of carbonic acid, which would have asphyxiated man if he had existed; the transformation of animal and vegetable species; etc. All these opinions, which their authors presented as realities, were found to be in opposition to the facts and, as such, rejected and condemned by the most competent men.

But we believe we must point out more particularly the error of that opinion of the original incandescence of the globe and of the existence of the central fire.

Its defenders entrenched themselves by sheltering behind the name of Buffon, who had imagined this hypothesis; they claimed to establish it as the basis of modern geology. But when our most celebrated mathematicians and physicists—Messrs. Poisson, Ampère, Laplace, and Arago—had submitted this theory to the test of rigorous calculation and of the true principles of science; when

they had set forth and analyzed the two principal proofs alleged in its favor, namely: 1. The resemblance of volcanic products to certain primitive rocks; 2. The increase of heat as one descends toward the center of the earth; they demonstrated its impossibility.

“If,” says the first, “the increase of temperature observed in the direction of depth really proceeded from the original heat, it would follow that, at the present epoch, this initial heat would increase the temperature even of the surface by a small fraction of a degree; but for this small increase to be reduced by half, for example, more than a thousand million centuries would have to elapse; and if one wished to go back to an epoch when it could have been considerable enough to influence geological phenomena, one would have to recede by a number of centuries that terrifies the boldest imagination, whatever, moreover, may be the idea one can have of the antiquity of our planet.¹⁸”

Mr. Poisson opposes many other difficulties to this opinion. “On this supposition,” he says, “the internal temperature would be excessive at less than sixty thousand meters of depth; and at the center, where this temperature would exceed two hundred thousand degrees, as in the greatest part of the terrestrial mass, the materials of which the earth is formed would be in

the state of incandescent gas, and at such a degree of condensation that their average density would exceed five times that of water. Now, to contain materials thus compressed and heated would require a force of which one could form no idea; the enveloping solidified layer would never be powerful enough to resist the effort of the interior fluids to reduce themselves to vapor; and these fluids, by their power of expansion, would have broken the outer solid envelope as it formed.¹⁹”

Mr. Ampère argues, in these terms, from another impossibility: “Those who admit the igneous liquidity of the earth’s interior nucleus appear not to have thought of the action which the earth would exert upon this enormous liquid mass, an action from which would result tides analogous to those of our seas, but far more terrible, both by their extent and by the density of the liquid. It is difficult to conceive how the envelope of the earth could resist, being incessantly beaten by a sort of hydraulic lever fourteen hundred leagues in length.²⁰”

This celebrated physicist, in one of his discourses at the Collège de France, attributes the progressively increasing heat of the earth, as one penetrates into its interior, to electrochemical actions produced by the various mineral materials of which

it is composed, and which make of it a sort of electric battery. This explanation is the one most generally admitted today.

Laplace, the author of the System of the World, had already proved that the hypothesis of the central fire is in direct contradiction with the increase of density in advancing toward the center of the earth. “The precession of the equinoxes,” he says, “and the nutation of the terrestrial axis indicate a diminution in the density of the layers of the spheroid, from the center to the surface, without, however, informing us of the true laws of this diminution. The principles of hydrostatics also require that, if the earth was originally fluid, the parts nearest the center should at the same time be the least dense.²¹”

Let us add to these testimonies that of Cuvier, who expressed himself thus upon this question: “All modern theories founded upon the most positive data which astronomy, physics, and geology furnish us admit that the earth was originally in the gaseous state, that is to say, that all the solid substances which compose it today were dispersed in the state of vapor in a space much larger than that which they occupy today.²²”

Arago also comes to support these negations of the central fire

with all the weight of his authority. Consistent with their principles, the Plutonian geologists claim that, at an epoch more or less remote, the world will perish for lack of heat. “Then,” says one of them, “there will no longer be life upon the globe, or at least, there being no longer either life or heat, and the waters forming only a mass of ice, none of the beings which live today will be able to exist there.²³”

The celebrated astronomer whom we have cited appraises this threat of the Plutonians in these terms: “The ingenious romance of the Plutonian geologists has dissipated like a phantom before the severity of mathematical calculations, and the frightful freezing of the globe, whose epoch Buffon fixed at the moment when the interior heat shall have been completely dissipated, is a pure dream.²⁴”

“It is demonstrated,” finally says Mr. Godefroy, “that in two thousand years, the total mass of the globe has not undergone the slightest diminution in its dimensions. This result destroys all the foundations of the hypothesis of a central fluidity.²⁵”

Thus, upon this point, the scientific authorities are in perfect agreement with the sacred text; for however much one may torture the expressions of Moses: Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas [the Spirit of God was borne over the waters]; Congregationes aquarum appellavit

maria [he called the gatherings of the waters seas]; Fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum [let a firmament be made in the midst of the waters], etc., etc.; one will never be able to make an incandescent liquid mass come forth from them.

Let us listen to Tertullian. “For us,” he says, “for us who are fishes led by Jesus Christ, our leader, we are born in the water, and can preserve our life only by remaining in that water… Water, indeed, is that element which, before the universe had received all its perfection, remained as though hidden in the power of God. Water alone served as a throne for the divine Spirit; it was by the waters that he separated the earth from the firmament; it was to the waters that he commanded the production of the body of man, which was created not from dry earth, but from mud. Having employed water for so many uses, it was understood that he would employ it again to procure supernatural life for us; for the Spirit of God, who is holy, could have been borne only by a holy thing.²⁶”

Saint Thomas concludes the discussion theologically by saying: “The authority of Holy Scripture is

greater than that of the genius of man. This is why we have the certainty that the waters of creation were truly waters, whatever their nature may have been.²⁷” Nevertheless, all these authorities, all these testimonies, all these reasons do not prevent several modern writers who have addressed geological questions from regarding the original incandescence of the globe as a generally accepted dogma, or at least an incontestable one, upon which science must support its labors.