The course of creation

by John Anderson

I. There is one important deduction to be established from these investigations which meets us at the threshold of the inquiry, namely, that geology clearly and distinctly shows there is a beginning to the course of creation as respects the crust of the earth and its organic forms of life. The stratified rocks all manifest succession in their order of deposition, and, therefore, also succession in time. Some are prior to and older in formation than others; and all of every class and quality, demonstrate principles of arrangement in conformity with law and design. We never, for example, get back to a period, however deep we go into the interior, in which we find the matter of the earth assuming, as it were, different modes of existence, or arranging itself according to affinities of which we have no experience. Over every material substance, the rocks of the oldest as of the newest formation, the same physical forces are seen to be operative. The granites, with all the molten amorphous masses of every age, are composed of ingredients brought together and aggregated in proportional quantities, and according to definite principles of attraction. But throughout the whole series and succession of deposits, we never come to a point at which matter has been formless, or free from the operation of law, endlessly quiescent, or when no controlling designing hand was rendering it plastic and obedient to its will.—As with the arrangements of matter, therefore, so likewise with its origin. We revert in both cases to a necessarily prior cause. And geology, vast and inconceivably great as may be its cycles, proclaims over all its past antecedents and depths of accumulation, that time, not eternity, is indelibly recorded.

This truth is rendered still more apparent and intelligible, when we consider the various families of plants and animals of which the earth has been the theater. These organic structures at once speak to the mind of creative interference. No principle that we know of inherent in nature could, of itself, originate these forms. The first thing of life indicates an intelligent Creator. But epoch after epoch passes away, and along with them their living tribes generally perish. Succeeding races, of different characters and habits, are called into existence. The earth is again peopled—again to be swept of all its garniture—the land and ocean to change places—creatures of another mold, suited to both, again to be brought into existence. These phenomena all speak, not only of a beginning, of successive periods of time, but also of direct superintendence over the course of events from age to age.

It is the same with the formations themselves in which the organic things are imbedded. The course of creation progresses, but always under such breaks and renewals as clearly to manifest, that the same power which watches over the organic, is operative also in respect of the inorganic structures of the earth. Various are the genera and species of once animate forms, imbedded in the different strata beneath our feet; but equally various are the strata themselves; as a new race arises, so are there new forms of rocks produced along with them. And when we compare the two extremes of the fossiliferous strata, the silurian and the tertiary, or any of the intermediate—the old red sandstone and the oolites, the carboniferous and the chalk—we find that the rocks are just as various in quality, structure, and appearance, as are the animals which existed and perished during their respective epochs. The lines of demarkation are distinct. They may sometimes run into each other, so as to leave it doubtful where the one series ends and the other begins; but so it is with the organic remains themselves, a few of an antecedent epoch living into and invading the province of another, when the limit is reached, and the family altogether disappears. The same law holds in the great mineral masses of the earth’s crust. Rocks are of different families, even as plants and animals are; and over the entire surface of the globe, they display in their various suites such changes and diversities as demonstrate an interfering hand and a new creative energy. Indeed, there is, it may be avowed, a much greater diversity of type in the mineral groups themselves than in their organisms, the living genera and species of one formation differing, often, less from each other than do the rocky matrices in which their remains are imbedded.

II. But, in estimating the time that elapsed during the formation of the various sedimentary strata, are geologists warranted in assuming such principles of calculation as have been adopted?—There are two aspects under which the subject may be approached—the one, as respects the formative process of rocks—the other, the probable duration of life in the different epochs, or rather, as connected with the formations which indicate the epochs.

1. Of the Formative Process. How long the earth existed before being brought into a habitable condition for either vegetable or animal bodies, geology has no means of determining. The primary crystalline beds are the oldest rocks of which we have any knowledge: we can penetrate at least to no antecedent matter, bearing the record of its own age, out of which these rocks were produced. We are warranted, therefore, in accounting for their origin, to remount at once to the initial creative act which called them into being, and the presumption is, that no great length of time was occupied in this arrangement. The Divine will commanded, every particle obeyed, and all took their places. The eruptive rocks are of comparatively sudden growth: they are not the result of a gradual deposition, but of igneous fusion in the interior of the earth, and elevated to the surface through the operation of forces of rapid activity. How long our planet was in thus assuming form, and the dry land appearing, we have no certain means of judging, except by looking to the end of its creation, and assuming that the “void” was not permitted indefinitely to continue. The occupancy of life at once exalts the work and illustrates its purpose.

The fossiliferous strata were formed in different circumstances and under different conditions, when the course of nature, if we may so speak, was fully established, and the train of events under the operation of physical law commenced its onward march. The oldest of the fossiliferous deposits is the Silurian. It likewise constitutes one of the greatest depth, as well as of extent, on the surface of the globe. The position, generally, of the silurian beds, is along the line of the great mountain-chains, except in Russia, where they spread over the interior, and thin out into smaller dimensions, and where, from the absence of the intrusive rocks, they are only semi-indurated. This system of rocks was, therefore, formed in circumstances the most favorable for rapid accumulation, amidst such primal operations of nature as have never been repeated upon the same scale of magnitude. The first shaping-out, if we may so speak, of the earth’s surface, in the elevation of its mountain-ranges and corresponding depressions of the sea-bottom, bears all the marks of a single cotemporaneous act, not completed in a moment of time indeed, but continued through a period of unparalleled spasmodic agency. Every region shared in the convulsive movements, and the whole earth, in one and the same age, was begirt with mountains. These violent throes were accompanied everywhere with violent action upon the already consolidated masses. Disintegration would keep pace upon them with the rate of uprise. And as the bare jagged rocks unprotected with herbage, friable and just rending from the fire, were lifted suddenly above the waters, the waters in turn would dash violently upon their sides and broken serrated crests, and so become as rapidly filled again with all the waste and spoils of the period. The changes now going on, and the rate of increment of the land above sea-level, the occasional appearance and disappearance of an island, the slow but constant action of the waves upon the coast, and the detrital matter borne down by the rivers, can be no measure of the effects of forces and agencies such as were then in operation. The Mississippi, within a quarter of a century, it has been ascertained, brings down little more than a half of its former spoils. The organic remains, accordingly, which have survived the silurian period, belong chiefly to the molluscous classes, and thin filmy fucoid vegetables; the structures, in short, which were best calculated to live during the period in question, and to remain undestroyed throughout its agitations.

The old red sandstone series is likewise of vast extent, both in depth and superficial area. The scale of its mass corresponds with the scale of the forces which produced it—the magnificent operations amidst which it was accumulated. This was a period of great and frequent trappean eruption. Hence the conglomerate red offers a splendid specimen of rapid formation. This member of the devonian suite consists of large masses of gneiss, quartz, mica-slate, and hornblende rock, cemented in a paste of silicious sand, probably the debris of dissolved granite. The included portions bear all the marks of attrition, of violent tossing about in a troubled sea. Estimate the thickness of the whole deposit at its maximum of nearly ten thousand feet—consider what vast agencies were still at work, in tearing up and carrying off the spoils of the mountains—probably with but little pause or intermission in the violence of the action—and thus, not so much in the light of remote antecedents as of comparatively associated formations, will we be warranted in regarding these early courses in the work of creation. The fishes of the period all speak of its spasmodic character, mailed, plated, and completely inclosed in strong horny integuments; their heads, some of them, of entire uncovered bone, and their caudal fins propelling with the whole force of the vertebral column,—conditions of structure which give indications of the stormy seas whose waves they had to buffet, and of the conserving properties by which their forms and outlines have been transmitted to us so wonderfully entire.

The carboniferous class of rocks have all the marks of a very peculiar formation, constructed for a special purpose, and elaborated amidst an extraordinary state of things. Here we meet with vast accumulations of vegetable, calcareous, and metallic substances, for which we detect no anterior preparations. The coming on and the outgoing of the whole coal series are as distinct as they are surprising. To what are we to compare them? By what scale of time are we to adjust the terms of their growth? Proceeding upon the existing laws of nature, calculations have been made as to the rate of increase, for a year, of pure vegetable matter, over a given area. The Ganges, Nile, Amazon, Mississippi, La Plata, and the other mighty rivers of the earth, have been appealed to as to the quantities with which they are annually charged. The forests, with their load of every revolving season, have been weighed, when their decadence of leaves, fruits, branches, and all the gatherings from the flood and storm have been duly taken into account. The result is, according to this method of solving the problem, that about six hundred thousand years were occupied in the production of the whole coal series.—It must be admitted, in any attempt to reduce this number, that the violent forces of the antecedent periods cannot be admitted as data of circulation; throughout the whole of the carboniferous era, a state of repose seems to have universally prevailed. But then all the living productive powers of nature were just as violently in operation as the others were quiescent, and the result in the one case bears a proportion to the result in the other. If inorganic matter was rapidly collected by the action of violent causes, so under an extraordinary state of things, of climate, moisture, atmosphere, and other physical arrangements, organized bodies, vegetable and animal, would multiply as rapidly. A condition of nature that produced uniformity of vegetation over the entire surface of the globe, as the coal deposit everywhere manifests, and all of gigantic dimensions in every family of plants, is not merely to be denominated tropical, and its results calculated by a scale of existing weights and measures. In many places of the earth, even now, several harvests are reaped within the year. Who can set bounds to their number, or guess the prodigious increase, when the whole earth was covered with a flora, not only of unrivaled exuberance, but of uniform distribution nearly on every part of its surface? But a test of indisputable value, for ascertaining the rate of increase in the sandstones and shales embraced within the coal-measures, occurs in the case of those fossil trees which are so frequently found in an upright position, or but little inclined to the plane of stratification. These are numerous in every coal-field, and are often traced through several layers or beds of rock. The fossil trees of Craigleith and Granton were about fifty feet in length, and lying at an angle of scarcely twenty degrees to the strata in which they were imbedded. Their passage through the solid rock, therefore, cannot be estimated at less than fifteen to twenty feet, that is, a mass of sandstone of corresponding depth must have been formed, during the comparatively short period that trees of lofty stature were able to resist the destroying action of the elements, to say nothing of the chances of currents, hurricanes, and other agents breaking them in pieces. This instantia crucis may be extended to every sandstone bed of the formation, and thus serve to exercise a salutary restraint upon the mind in its imaginary conceptions of the enormous periods of time required for the accumulation of the whole series.

The carboniferous epoch was immediately succeeded by a period of great violence and of vast disturbance in the solid crust of the earth. Hence the broken inclined position of the coal strata, and the injection of so much igneous matter, forming often ridges and hills of considerable elevation. The new red sandstone, the overlying deposits, would share in all the activity of the time. A celerity of increase, on a scale of more rapid accumulation than existing causes could produce, must consequently fall to be admitted to the rocks of this family: so much, indeed, was the plutonic agency then in force, that the rock-salt and gypseous beds are ascribed to its influence. From this period downward, the formations are all of more contracted dimensions, the basins narrowing in superficial area to the upper tertiaries, which partake of the character of local rather than of universal deposits; while the evidences here are innumerable that, until the globe settled into its present form, and assumed its present arrangement of seas, continents, and mountains, the land and water were continually changing places, the crust and framework subject to constant upheaval. The Cordilleras and Himalaya constituted, in those days, the bed of the ocean. What law of nature was not in violent activity ere they attained their sublime altitudes! How many rivers changed their courses! how many mountains were washed to their summits! how many hills melted like wax at the voice of their Creator, amidst convulsions which swept the earth so repeatedly of its living tribes, and bared as often the bosom of the great deep!

We have not, in this enumeration of the mineral strata of the earth’s crust, as yet spoken of any of the calcareous deposits. They are very numerous, some of them of prodigious thickness, and belong to the formations of every epoch. There is not one, but many, alternations of limestone connected with every such formation. Whence the source of all this material? The primary beds are not in sufficient mass to have furnished supplies for every succeeding age. The mountain limestone alone, of the middle secondary epoch, contains more calcareous matter than is to be found in the three antecedent periods. The lias, oolites, and chalks are likewise of vast thickness. The beds of the tertiary group are less considerable; but in the gypseous marls, and numerous alternating bands throughout the clays and sands of the formation, there is the clearest evidence that the stores of nature were still abundant. Nor are they yet exhausted. What supplies in every river, sea, and ocean of the world! What countless myriads of living animals are now employed in elaborating the material! And when we again inquire, whence is it all? the answer is, that throughout all time, a wise and bountiful Providence has thereby provided the pabulum for its successive creations of organized bodies—the law of their nature is to pile up rocks—and in all the monuments of the past, we discern the style and architecture of the builders of the present. Look, then, to your still active, living, working chronometer. With what incredible swiftness do these minute creatures ply their labors! how many fathoms of coral reef will they rear in a season! When the hapless mariner returns, after a brief short interval, what hazards to run from structures which now for the first time appall him with their formidable barriers! Millions of years! Not even thousands are needed to construct islands, and to pillar the floor of the ocean, over vast expanded areas, with broad, massive, indurated rock.[13]