THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL.

It is now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the Scottish Church, engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, took occasion in enumerating the various earths of the chemist, to allude to the science, then in its infancy, that specially deals with the rocks and soils which these earths compose. "There is a prejudice," he remarked, "against the speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to remove. It has been said that they nurture infidel propensities. It has been alleged that geology, by referring the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than is assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our faith in the inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating prospects of the immortality which it unfolds. This is a false alarm. The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."

The bold lecturer on this occasion,—for it needed no small courage in a divine of any Established Church to take up, at the beginning of the present century, a position so determined on the geologic side,—was at the time an obscure young man, characterized, in the small circle in which he moved, by the ardor of his temperament and the breadth and originality of his views; but not yet distinguished in the science or literature of his country, and of comparatively little weight in the theological field. He was marked, too, by what his soberer acquaintance deemed eccentricities of thought and conduct. When the opposite view was all but universal, he held and taught that free trade would be not only a general benefit to the people of this country, but would inflict permanent injury on no one class or portion of them; and further, at a time when the streets and lanes of all the great cities of the empire were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held that the time was not distant when a carburetted hydrogen gas would be substituted instead; and, on getting his snug parsonage-house repaired, he actually introduced into the walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage into its various rooms of the gaseous fluid yet to be employed as the illuminating agent. Time and experience have since impressed their stamp on these supposed eccentricities, and shown them to be the sagacious forecastings of a man who saw further and more clearly than his contemporaries; and fame has since blown his name very widely, as one of the most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one of the most thoroughly earnest and sincere, of modern theologians. The bold lecturer of St. Andrews was Dr. Thomas Chalmers,—a divine whose writings are now known wherever the English language is spoken, and whose wonderful eloquence lives in memory as a vanished power, which even his extraordinary writings fail adequately to represent. And in the position which he took up at this early period with respect to geology and the Divine Record, we have yet another instance of the great sagacity of the man, and of his ability of correctly estimating the prevailing weight of the evidence with which, though but partially collected at the time, the geologist was preparing to establish the leading propositions of his science. Even in this late age, when the scientific standing of geology is all but universally recognized, and the vast periods of time which it demands fully conceded, neither geologist nor theologian, could, in any new scheme of reconciliation, shape his first proposition more skilfully than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half century ago. It has formed since that time the preliminary proposition of those ornaments of at once science and the English Church, the present venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Bird Sumner, with Doctors Buckland, Conybeare, and Professor Sedgwick; of eminent evangelistic Dissenters too, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Harris, Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James Hamilton, and the Rev. Mr. Binney,—enlightened and distinguished men, who all came early to the conclusion, with the lecturer of St. Andrews, that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."

In 1814, ten years after the date of the St. Andrews' lectures, Dr. Chalmers produced his more elaborate scheme of reconciliation between the Divine and the Geologic Records, in a "Review of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth;" and that scheme, perfectly adequate to bring the Mosaic narrative into harmony with what was known at the time of geologic history, has been very extensively received and adopted. It may, indeed, still be regarded as the most popular of the various existing schemes. It teaches, and teaches truly, that between the first act of creation, which evoked out of the previous nothing the matter of the heavens and earth, and the first act of the first day's work recorded in Genesis, periods of vast duration may have intervened; but further, it insists that the days themselves were but natural days of twenty-four hours each; and that, ere they began, the earth, though mayhap in the previous period a fair residence of life, had become void and formless, and the sun, moon, and stars, though mayhap they had before given light, had been, at least in relation to our planet, temporarily extinguished. In short, while it teaches that the successive creations of the geologist may all have found ample room in the period preceding that creation to which man belongs, it teaches also that the record in Genesis bears reference to but the existing creation, and that there lay between it and the preceding ones a chaotic period of death and darkness. The scheme propounded by the late Dr. Pye Smith, and since adopted by several writers, differs from that of Chalmers in but one circumstance, though an important one. Dr. Smith held, with the great northern divine, that the Mosaic days were natural days; that they were preceded by a chaotic period; and that the work done in them related to but that last of the creations to which the human species belongs. Further, however, he held in addition, that the chaos of darkness and confusion out of which that creation was called was of but limited extent, and that outside its area, and during the period of its existence, many of our present lands and seas may have enjoyed the light of the sun, and been tenanted by animals and occupied by plants, the descendants of which still continue to exist. The treatise of Dr. Pye Smith was published exactly a quarter of a century posterior to the promulgation, through the press, of the argument of Dr. Chalmers; and this important addition,—elaborated by its author between the years 1837 and 1839,—seems to have been made to suit the more advanced state of geological science at the time. The scheme of reconciliation perfectly adequate in 1814 was found in 1839 to be no longer so; and this mainly through a peculiarity in the order in which geological fact has been evolved and accumulated in this country, and the great fossiliferous systems studied and wrought out; to which I must be permitted briefly to advert.

William Smith, the "Father of English Geology," as he has been well termed (a humble engineer and mineral surveyor, possessed of but the ordinary education of men of his class and profession), was born upon the English Oolite,—that system which, among the five prevailing divisions of the great Secondary class of rocks, holds exactly the middle place. The Triassic system and the Lias lie beneath it; the Cretaceous system and the Weald rest above. Smith, while yet a child, had his attention attracted by the Oolitic fossils; and it was observed, that while his youthful contemporaries had their garnered stores of marbles purchased at the toy shop, he had collected, instead, a hoard of spherical fossil terebratulæ, which served the purposes of the game equally well. The interest which he took in organic remains, and the deposits in which they occur, influenced him in the choice of a profession; and, when supporting himself in honest independence as a skilful mineral surveyor and engineer, he travelled over many thousand miles of country, taking as his starting point the city of Bath, which stands near what is termed the Great Oolite: and from that centre he carefully explored the various Secondary formations above and below. He ascertained that these always occur in a certain determinate order; that each contains fossils peculiar to itself; and that they run diagonally across the kingdom in nearly parallel lines from north-east to south-west. And, devoting every hour which he could snatch from his professional labors to the work, in about a quarter of a century, or rather more, he completed his great stratigraphical map of England. But, though a truly Herculean achievement, regarded as that of a single man unindebted to public support, and uncheered by even any very general sympathy in his labors, it was found to be chiefly valuable in its tracings of the Secondary deposits, and strictly exact in only that Oolitic centre from which his labors began. It was remarked at an early period that he ought to have restricted his publication to the formations which lie between the Chalk and the Red Marl inclusive; or, in other words, to the great Secondary division. The Coal Measures had, however, been previously better known, from their economic importance, and the number of the workings opened among them, than the deposits of any other system; and ere the publication of the map of Smith, Cuvier and Brogniart had rendered famous all over the world the older Tertiary formations of the age of the London Clay. But both ends of the geological scale, comprising those ancient systems older than the Coal, and representative of periods in which, so far as is yet known, life, animal and vegetable, first began upon our planet, and those systems of comparatively modern date, representative of the periods which immediately preceded the human epoch, were equally unknown. The light fell strongly on only that middle portion of the series on which the labors of Smith had been mainly concentrated. The vast geologic bridge, which, like that in the exquisite allegory of Addison, strode across a "part of the great tide of eternity," "had a black cloud hanging at each end of it." And such was the state of geologic science when, in 1814, Dr. Chalmers framed his scheme of reconciliation.

Since that time, however, a light not less strong than the one thrown by William Smith on the formations of the Lias and the Oolite has been cast on both the older and the newer fossiliferous systems. Two great gaps still remain to be filled up,—that which separates the Palæozoic from the Secondary division, and that which separates the Secondary from the Tertiary one. But they occur at neither end of the geological scale. Mainly through the labors of two distinguished geologists, who, finding the geologic school of their own country distracted by a fierce and fruitless controversy, attached themselves to the geologic school of England, and have since received the honor of knighthood in acknowledgment of their labors, both ends of the geologic scale have been completed. Sir Roderick Murchison addressed himself to the formations older than the Coal, more especially to the Upper and Lower Silurian systems, from the Ludlow rooks to the Llandeilo flags. The Old Red Sandstone too, a system which lies more immediately beneath the Coal, has also been explored, and its various deposits, with their peculiar organic remains, enumerated and described. And Sir Charles Lyell, setting himself to the other extremity of the scale, has wrought out the Tertiary formations, and separated them into the four great divisions which they are now recognized as forming. And of these, the very names indicate that certain proportions of their organisms still continue to exist. It is a great fact, now fully established in the course of geological discovery, that between the plants which in the present time cover the earth, and the animals which inhabit it, and the animals and plants of the later extinct creations, there occurred no break or blank, but that, on the contrary, many of the existing organisms were contemporary during the morning of their being, with many of the extinct ones during the evening of theirs. We know further, that not a few of the shells which now live on our coasts, and several of even the wild animals which continue to survive amid our tracts of hill and forest, were in existence many ages ere the human age began. Instead of dating their beginning only a single natural day, or at most two natural days, in advance of man, they must have preceded him by many thousands of years. In fine, in consequence of that comparatively recent extension of geologic fact in the direction of the later systems and formations, through which we are led to know that the present creation was not cut off abruptly from the preceding one, but that, on the contrary, it dovetailed into it at a thousand different points, we are led also to know, that any scheme of reconciliation which would separate between the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the necessities of the case. Though perfectly adequate forty years ago, it has been greatly outgrown by the progress of geological discovery, and is, as I have said, adequate no longer; and it becomes a not unimportant matter to determine the special scheme that would bring into completest harmony the course of creation, as now ascertained by the geologist, and that brief but sublime narrative of its progress which forms a meet introduction in Holy Writ to the history of the human family. The first question to which we must address ourselves in any such inquiry is of course a very obvious one,—What are the facts scientifically determined which now demand a new scheme of reconciliation?

There runs around the shores of Great Britain and Ireland a flat terrace of unequal breadth, backed by an escarpment of varied height and character, which is known to geologists as the old coast-line. On this flat terrace most of the seaport towns of the empire are built. The subsoil which underlies its covering of vegetable mould consists usually of stratified sands and gravels, arranged after the same fashion as on the neighboring beach, and interspersed in the same manner with sea shells. The escarpment behind, when formed of materials of no great coherency, such as gravel or clay, exists as a sloping, grass-covered bank,—at one place running out into promontories that encroach upon the terrace beneath,—at another receding into picturesque, bay-like recesses; and where composed, as in many localities, of rock of an enduring quality, we find it worn, as if by the action of the surf,—in some parts relieved into insulated stacks, in others hollowed into deep caverns,—in short, presenting all the appearance of a precipitous coast-line, subjected to the action of the waves. Now, no geologist can or does doubt that this escarpment was at one time the coast-line of the island,—the line against which the waves broke at high water in some distant age, when either the sea stood from twenty to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now, or the land sat from twenty to thirty feet lower. Nor can the geologist doubt, that along the flat terrace beneath, with its stratified beds of sand and gravel, and its accumulations of sea shells, the tides must have risen and fallen twice every day, as they now rise and fall along the beach that at present girdles our country. But, in reference to at least human history, the age of the old coast-line and terrace must be a very remote one. Though geologically recent, it lies far beyond the reach of any written record. It has been shown by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, one of our highest authorities on the subject, that the wall of Antoninus, erected by the Romans as a protection against the Northern Caledonians, was made to terminate at the Firths of Forth and Clyde, with relation, not to the level of the old coast-line, but to that of the existing one. And so we must infer that, ere the year A.D. 140 (the year during which, according to our antiquaries, the greater part of the wall was erected) the old coast-line had attained to its present elevation over the sea. Further, however, we know from the history of Diodorus the Sicilian, that at a period earlier by at least two hundred years, St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, was connected with the mainland at low water, just as it is now, by a flat isthmus, across which, upon the falling of the tide, the ancient Cornish miners used to carry over their tin in carts. Had the relative levels of sea and land been those of the old coast-line at the time, St. Michael's Mount, instead of being accessible at low ebb would have been separated from the shore by a strait from three to five fathoms in depth. It would not have been then as now, as described in the verse of Carew,—

"Both land and island twice a day."

But even the incidental notice of Diodorus Siculus represents very inadequately the antiquity of the existing coast-line. Some of its caves, hollowed in hard rock in the line of faults and shifts by the attrition of the surf, are more than a hundred feet in depth; and it must have required many centuries to excavate tough trap or rigid gneiss to a depth so considerable, by a process so slow. And yet, however long the sea may have stood against the present coast-line, it must have stood for a considerably longer period against the ancient one. The latter presents generally marks of greater attrition than the modern line, and its wave-hollowed caves are of a depth considerably more profound. In determining, on an extensive tract of coast, the average profundity of both classes of caverns from a considerable number of each, I ascertained that the proportional average depth of the modern to the ancient is as two to three. For every two centuries, then, during which the waves have been scooping out the caves of the present coast-line, they must have been engaged for three centuries in scooping out those of the old one. But we know historically, that for at least twenty centuries the sea has been toiling in these modern caves; and who shall dare affirm that it has not been toiling in them for at least ten centuries more? But if the sea has stood for but even two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line (and no geologist would dare fix his estimate lower), then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one third deeper, three thousand nine hundred years. And both periods united (six thousand five hundred years) more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line form! It is but a mere starting point from the recent period. Not a single shell seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand five hundred years! The shells which lie embedded in the subsoils beneath the old coast-line are exactly those which still live in our seas.

Fig. 87. ASTARTE ARCTICA. Fig. 88. TELLINA PROXIMA.