It seems strange that the discovery of the earth’s true shape and movements was not sooner followed by investigation into her contents, but the old ideas of special creation remained unaffected by these and other discoveries, and the more or less detailed account of the process of creation furnished in the book of Genesis sufficed to arrest curiosity. In the various departments of the inorganic universe the earth was the last to become subject of scientific research; as in study of the organic universe, man excluded himself till science compelled his inclusion.
After more than two thousand years, the Ionian philosophers “come to their own” again. Xenophanes of Colophon has been referred to as arriving, five centuries B. C., at a true explanation of the imprints of plants and animals in rocks. Pythagoras, who lived before him, may, if Ovid, writing near the Christian era, is to be trusted, have reached some sound conclusions about the action of water in the changes of land and sea areas. But we are on surer ground when we meet the geographer Strabo, who lived in the reign of Augustus. Describing the countries in which he travelled, he notes their various features, and explains the causes of earthquakes and allied phenomena. Then eleven hundred years pass before we find any explanation of like rational character supplied. This was furnished by the Arabian philosopher, Avicenna, whose theory of the origin of mountains is the more marvellous when we remember what intellectual darkness surrounded him. He says that “mountains may be due to two different causes. Either they are effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, some hard. The winds and waters disintegrate the one, but leave the other intact. Most of the eminences of the earth have had this latter origin. It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size. But that water has been the main cause of these effects is proved by the existence of fossil remains of aquatic and other animals on many mountains” (cf. Osborn’s From the Greeks to Darwin, p. 76). A similar explanation of fossils was given by the engineer-artist Leonardo de Vinci in the fifteenth century, and by the potter Bernard Palissy, in the sixteenth century; but thence onward, for more than a hundred years, the earth was as a sealed book to man. The earlier chapters of its history, once reopened, have never been closed again. Varied as were the theories of the causes which wrought manifold changes on its surface, they agreed in demanding a far longer time-history than the Church was willing to allow. If the reasoning of the geologists was sound, the narrative in Genesis was a myth. Hence the renewal of struggle between the Christian Church and Science, waged, at first, over the six days of the Creation.
Here and there, in bygone days, a sceptical voice had been raised in denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Such was that of La Peyrère who, in 1655, published an instalment of a work in which he anticipated what is nowadays accepted, but what then was akin to blasphemy to utter. For not only does he doubt whether Moses had any hand in the writings attributed to him: he rejects the orthodox view of suffering and death as the penalties of Adam’s disobedience; and gives rationalistic interpretation of the appearance of the star of Bethlehem, and of the darkness at the Crucifixion. But La Peyrère became a Roman Catholic, and, of course, recanted his opinions. Then, nearer the time when controversy on the historical character of the Scriptures was becoming active, one Astruc, a French physician, suggested, in a work published in 1753, that Moses may have used older materials in his compilation of the earlier parts of the Pentateuch.
But, practically, the five books included under that name, were believed to have been written by Moses under divine authority. The statement in Genesis that God made the universe and its contents, both living and non-living, in six days of twenty-four hours each, was explicit. Thus interpreted, as their plain meaning warranted, Archbishop Usher made his famous calculation as to the time elapsing between the creation and the birth of Christ. Dr. White, in his important Warfare of Science with Theology, gives an amusing example of the application of Usher’s method in detail. A seventeenth century divine, Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, computed that “man was created by the Trinity on 23d October, 4004 B. C., at nine o’clock in the morning.” The same theologian, who, by the way, was a very eminent Hebrew scholar, following the interpretation of the great Fathers of the Church, “declared, as the result of profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, that ‘heaven and earth, centre and circumference, and clouds full of water, were created all together, in the same instant.’”
The story of the Deluge was held to furnish sufficing explanation of the organic remains yielded by the rocks, but failing this, a multitude of fantastic theories were at hand to explain the fossils. They were said to be due to a “formative quality” in the soil; to its “plastic virtue”; to a “lapidific juice”; to the “fermentation of fatty matter”; to “the influence of the heavenly bodies,” or, as the late eminent naturalist, Philip Gosse, seriously suggested in his whimsical book Omphalos: an Attempt to untie the Geological Knot, they were but simulacra wherewith a mocking Deity rebuked the curiosity of man. Every explanation, save the right and obvious one, had its defenders, because it was essential to support some theory to rebut the evidence supplied by remains of animals as to the existence of death in the world before the fall of Adam. Otherwise, the statements in the Old Testament, on which the Pauline reasoning rested, were baseless, and to discredit these was to undermine the authority of the Scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse. No wonder, therefore, that theology was up in arms, or that it saw in geology a deadlier foe than astronomy had seemed to be in ages past. The Sorbonne, or Faculty of Theology, in Paris burnt the books of the geologists, banished their authors, and, in the case of Buffon, the famous naturalist, condemned him to retract the awful heresy, which was declared “contrary to the creed of the Church,” contained in these words: “The waters of the sea have produced the mountains and valleys of the land; the waters of the heavens, reducing all to a level, will at last deliver the whole land over to the sea, and the sea successively prevailing over the land, will leave dry new continents like those which we inhabit.” So the old man repeated the submission of Galileo, and published his recantation: “I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses.” That was in the year 1751.
If the English theologians could not deliver heretics of the type of Buffon to the secular arm, they used all the means that denunciation supplied for delivering them over to Satan. Epithets were hurled at them; arguments drawn from a world accursed of God levelled at them. Saint Jerome, living in the fourth century, had pointed to the cracked and crumpled rocks as proof of divine anger: now Wesley and others saw in “sin the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause might be,” since before Adam’s transgression, no convulsions or eruptions ruffled the calm of Paradise. Meanwhile, the probing of the earth’s crust went on; revealing, amidst all the seeming confusion of distorted and metamorphosed rocks, an unvarying sequence of strata, and of the fossils imbedded in them. Different causes were assigned for the vast changes ranging over vast periods; one school believing in the action of volcanic and such like catastrophic agents; another in the action of aqueous agents, seeing, more consistently, in present operations the explanation of the causes of past changes. But there was no diversity of opinion concerning the extension of the earth’s time-history and life-history to millions on millions of years.
So, when this was to be no longer resisted, theologians sought some basis of compromise on such non-fundamental points as the six days of creation. It was suggested that perhaps these did not mean the seventh part of a week, but periods, or eons, or something equally elastic; and that if the Mosaic narrative was regarded as a poetic revelation of the general succession of phenomena, beginning with the development of order out of chaos, and ending with the creation of man, Scripture would be found to have anticipated or revealed what science confirms. It was impossible, so theologians argued, that there could be aught else than harmony between the divine works and the writings which were assumed to be of divine origin. Science could not contradict revelation, and whatever seemed contradictory was due to misapprehension either of the natural fact, or to misreading of the written word. But although the story of the creation might be clothed, as so exalted and moving a theme warranted, in poetic form, that of the fall of Adam and of the drowning of his descendants, eight persons excepted, must be taken in all its appalling literalness. Confirmation of the Deluge story was found in the fossil shells on high mountain tops; while as for the giants of antediluvian times, there were the huge bones in proof. Some of these relics of mastodon and mammoth were actually hung up in churches as evidence that “there were giants in those days”! Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire tells of one Henrion, who published a book in 1718 giving the height of Adam as one hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches, and of Eve as one hundred and eighteen feet nine inches, Noah being of rather less stature. But to parley with science is fatal to theology. Moreover, arguments which involve the cause they support in ridicule may be left to refute themselves. And while theology was hesitating, as in the amusing example supplied by Dr. William Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible (published in 1863) wherein the reader, turning up the article “Deluge,” is referred to “Flood,” and thence to “Noah”; archæology produced the Chaldæan original of the legend whence the story of the flood is derived. With candour as commendable as it is rare, the Reverend Professor Driver, from whom quotation has been made already, admits that “read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i. creates an impression at variance with the facts revealed by science”; all efforts at reconciliation being only “different modes of obliterating the characteristic features of Genesis, and of reading into it a view which it does not express.”
While the ground in favour of the literal interpretation of Genesis was being contested, an invading force, that had been gathering strength with the years, was advancing in the shape of the science of Biology. The workers therein fall into two classes: the one, represented by Linnaeus and his school, applied themselves to the classifying and naming of plants and animals; the other, represented by Cuvier and his school, examined into structure and function. Anatomy made clear the machinery: physiology the work which it did, and the conditions under which the work was done. Then, through comparison of corresponding organs and their functions in various life-forms, came growing perception of their unity. But only to a few came gleams of that unity as proof of common descent of plant and animal, for, save in scattered hints of inter-relation between species, which occur from the time of Lord Bacon onward, the theory of their immutability was dominant until forty years ago.
Four men form the chief vanguard of the biological movement. “Modern classificatory method and nomenclature have largely grown out of the work of Linnaeus; the modern conception of biology, as a science, and of its relation to climatology, geography, and geology, are as largely rooted in the labours of Buffon; comparative anatomy and palæontology owe a vast debt to Cuvier’s results; while invertebrate zoology and the revival of the idea of Evolution are intimately dependent on the results of the work of Lamarck. In other words, the main results of biology up to the early years of this century are to be found in, or spring out of, the works of these men.”
Linnaeus, son of a Lutheran pastor, born at Roeshult, in Sweden, in 1707, had barely passed his twenty-fifth year before laying the ground-plan of the system of classification which bears his name, a system which advance in knowledge has since modified. Based on external resemblances, its formulation was possible only to a mind intent on minute and accurate detail, and less observant of general principles. In brief, the work of Linnaeus was constructive, not interpretative. Hence, perhaps, conjoined to the theological ideas then current, the reason why the larger question of the fixity of species entered not into his purview. To him each plant and animal retained the impress of the Creative hand that had shaped it “in the beginning,” and, throughout his working life, he departed but slightly from the plan with which he started, namely, “reckoning as many species as issued in pairs” from the Almighty fiat.