There are potent “menstrua” and mighty furnaces in the laboratory of Nature; and while the actual amount of MATTER in existence has, we suppose, never varied since the original creative act which gave birth to “the heaven and the earth,” the conditions, sensible or chemical, under which that matter presents itself have altered from century to century and from moment to moment.
It is impossible to deem otherwise, if we believe that the “laws” which are established now in this creation were established then.
Let us take, for instance, the law of Universal Gravitation, that law by which the heavenly bodies move in their orbits, and a seconds’ pendulum measures time at the surface of our Earth.
We feel assured that this law has never varied; but it is almost equally certain that it must have begun to operate under different conditions from those which obtain at this day.
Newton, who always maintained that the commencing axillary movement of the Earth was due to an impulse from the hand of the Creator when He launched it into space,[5] and who declared that without this he could in no way account for its having rotatory motion at all, was nevertheless willing to allow that the time occupied in the first rotation may not have been, as now, twenty-four hours, but possibly an entire year. And as the Earth, once projected, would fulfil, according to the Law of Gravity, the conditions of “a body falling through space,” we find that taking the nth term (2n-1) of the arithmetical series … 1. 3. 5. 7. … (2n-1) … where the successive terms represent the velocities acquired in successive annual periods, about 183 such terms must elapse before 365 rotations would be accomplished within the space of one year, or, in other words, the rotation of the earth be diurnal, as at present. This point of speed once reached, the centrifugal and centripetal forces balanced one another, and the axillary movement became steady.
Of course, in the above hypothesis, the assuming of one year for the first period is arbitrary; it may have been more, it may have been less; but within certain limits there is no absolute reason for supposing that it was a span of twenty-four hours, as now. Revelation nowhere asserts such a dogma.
Supposing, then, amid confessed ignorance as to how the fact stood, that the Earth’s early times of rotation were far longer than now, and taking, say, one year as the first period, how would this influence other features in a scene which has now long gone by? How would it influence the Tides of the Ocean?
Assuming a correspondingly slow motion of the Moon in her orbit, we should, it seems, have in the lapse of the first year one rotation of the Earth and two Tides of the Ocean; in the second year, three rotations of the Earth and six Tides answering to them; and so on.
Now these flowing Tides would, in fact, have been vast inundations, the sea rising steadily for many months together; and in like manner the prolonged ebb which followed upon each flood would have given rise to a subsidence and to the deposition of such particles of mud, lime, silex, &c., as the waters then held in solution after their visiting the higher land.