The World Before the Deluge

by Louis Figuier

It is not to be supposed that amongst the various hypotheses of which the cosmogony of the world has been the object, a literal acceptation of the scriptural account finds no defenders among men of science. “Why,” asks one of these writers,[8] after some scornful remarks upon the geologists and their science—“why an omnipotent Creator should have called into being a gaseous-granite nebulous world, only to have to cool it down again, consisting as it does of an endless variety of substances, should even have been supposed to be originally constituted of the matter of granite alone, for nothing else was provided by the theory, nobody can rationally explain. How the earth’s centre now could be liquid fire with its surface solid and cold and its seas not boiling caldrons, has never been attempted to be accounted for. How educated gentlemen, engaged in scientific investigations, ever came to accept such a monstrously stupid mass of absurdities as deductions of ‘science,’ and put them in comparison with the rational account of the creation given by Moses, is more difficult to understand than even this vague theory itself, which it is impossible to describe.

“Of the first creation of the chaotic world,” the same writer goes on to say, “or the material elements, before they were shaped into their present forms, we can scarce have the most vague conception. All our experience relates to their existing conditions. But knowing somewhat of the variety of the constituent elements and their distinct properties, by which they manifest their existence to us, we cannot conceive of their creation without presupposing a Divine wisdom, and—if I may say so, with all reverence, and only to suit our human notions—a Divine ingenuity,” and he follows for six days the operations as described by Moses, with a running comment. When light is created, the conception of the work becomes simpler to our minds. Its least manifestation would suffice at once to dispel darkness, and yet how marvellous is the light! In the second day’s work the firmament of heaven is opened; the expanse of the air between the heavens and the earth, dividing the waters above from the waters below, is the work recorded as performed. Not till the third day commence the first geological operations. The waters of the earth are gathered together into seas, and the dry land is made to appear. It is now that we can imagine that the formation of the primary strata commenced, while by some of the internal forces of matter the earth was elevated and stood above the waters.

Immediately the dry land is raised above and separated from the waters the fiat goes forth, “Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb and tree;” vegetable life begins to exist, and the world is first decorated with its beauteous flora, with all its exquisite variety of forms and brilliancy of colouring, with which not even Solomon in all his glory can compare. In like manner, on the sixth day the earth is commanded to bring forth land-animals—the living creature “after his kind,” cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth, “after his kind;” and last of all, but on the same day, man is created, and made the chief and monarch of God’s other living creatures—for that is “man’s place in Nature.” “Let us now see,” he continues, “how this history came to be discredited by the opposition of a falsely so-called ‘science’ of geology, that, while spared by our theologians, has since pulled itself to pieces. The first step in the false inductions geology made arose from the rash deduction, that the order in which the fossil remains of organic being were found deposited in the various strata necessarily determined the order of their creation; and the next error arose from blindly rushing to rash conclusions, and hasty generalisation from a very limited number of facts, and the most imperfect investigations. There were also (and, indeed, are still) some wild dogmatisms as to the time necessary to produce certain geologic formations; but the absurdities of science culminated when it adopted from Laplace the irrational and unintelligible theory of a natural origin for the world from a nebula of gaseous granite, intensely hot, and supposed to be gradually cooled while gyrating senselessly in space.”

In this paper the writer does not attempt to deal with the various phenomena of volcanoes, earthquakes, hot springs, and other matters which are usually considered as proofs of great internal heat. Mr. Evan Hopkins, C.E., F.G.S., is more precise if less eloquent. He shows that, in tropical countries, plains of gravel may in a day be converted into lagoons and marshes; that by the fall of an avalanche rivers have been blocked up, which, bursting their banks, have covered many square miles of fertile country with several feet of mud, sand, and gravel. “Two thousand four hundred years ago,” he says, “Nineveh flourished in all its grandeur, yet it is now buried in oblivion, and its site overwhelmed with sand. Look at old Tyre, once the queen of cities and mistress of the sea. She was in all her pride two thousand four hundred and forty years ago. We now see but a bare rock in the sea, on which fishermen spread their nets! A thousand years ago, according to Icelandic histories, Greenland was a fertile land in the south, and supported a large population. Iceland at that period was covered with forests of birch and fir, and the inhabitants cultivated barley and other grain. We may, therefore, conclude, with these facts before us, that there is no necessity to assign myriads of ages to terrestrial changes, as assumed by geologists, as they can be accounted for by means of alterations effected during a few thousand years, for the surface of the earth is ever changing.

“Grant geological speculators,” Mr. Hopkins continues, “a few millions of centuries, with a command over the agencies of Nature to be brought into operation when and how they please, and they think they can form a world with every variety of rock and vegetation, and even transform a worm into a man! Yet the wisest of our philosophers would be puzzled if called upon to explain why fluids become spheres, as dew-drops; why carbonate of lime acquires in solidifying from a liquid the figure of an obtuse rhomboihedron, silica of a six-sided prism; and why oxygen and hydrogen gases produce both fire and water. And what do they gain,” he proceeds to ask, “by carrying back the history of the world to these myriads of centuries? Do they, by the extension of the period to infinity, explain how the ‘Original’ materials were created? But,” he adds, “geologists are by no means agreed in their assumed geological periods! The so-called glacial period has been computed by some to be equal to about eighty-three thousand years, and by others at even as much as twelve hundred and eighty millions of years! Were we to ask for a demonstrative proof of any given deposit being more than four or five thousand years old, they could not give it. Where is Babylon, the glory of the kingdoms? Look at Thebes, and behold its colossal columns, statues, temples, obelisks, and palaces desolated; and yet those great cities flourished within the last three thousand years. Even Pompeii and Herculaneum were all but lost to history! What,” he asks after these brief allusions to the past—“what, as a matter of fact, have geologists discovered, as regards the great terrestrial changes, more than was known to Pythagoras and the ancient philosophers who taught, two thousand three hundred and fifty years ago, ‘that the surface of the earth was ever changing—solid land converted into sea, sea changed into dry land, marine shells lying far distant from the deep, valleys excavated by running water, and floods washing down hills into the sea?’”

In reference to the argument of the vast antiquity of the earth, founded on elevation of coasts at a given rate of upheaval, he adduces many facts to show that upheavals of equal extent have occurred almost within the memory of man. Two hundred and fifty years ago Sir Francis Drake, with his fleet, sailed into Albemarle Sound through Roanoke Outlet, which is now a sand-bank above the reach of the highest tides. Only seventy years ago it was navigable by vessels drawing twelve feet of water. The whole American coast, both on the Atlantic and Pacific, have undergone great changes within the last hundred years. The coast of South America has, in some places, been upheaved twenty feet in the last century; in others, a few hundred miles distant, it has been depressed to an equal extent. A transverse section from Rio Santa Cruz to the base of the Cordilleras, and another in the Rio Negro, in Patagonia, showed that the whole sedimentary series is of recent origin. Scattered over the whole at various heights above the sea, from thirteen hundred feet downwards, are found recent shells of littoral species of the neighbouring coast—denoting upheavals which might have been effected during the last three thousand years.

Coming nearer home, he shows that in 1538 the whole coast of Pozzuoli, near Naples, was raised twenty feet in a single night. Then, with regard to more compact crystalline or semi-crystalline rocks, no reliable opinion can be formed on mere inspection. Two blocks of marble may appear precisely alike, though formed at different periods. A crystal of carbonate of lime, formed in a few years, would be found quite perfect, and as compact as a crystal formed during many centuries. Nothing can be deduced from the process of petrifaction and crystallisation, unless they enclose relics of a known period. At San Filippo, a solid mass of limestone thirty feet thick has been formed in about twenty years. A hard stratum of travertine a foot thick is obtained, from these thermal springs, in the course of four months. Nor can geologists demonstrate that the Amiens deposits, in which the flint-implements occur, are more than three or four thousand years old.

The causes of these changes and mutations are referred by some persons to floods, or to pre-Adamite convulsions, whereas the cause is in constant operation; they are due to an invisible and subtle power which pervades the air, the ocean, and the rocks below—in which all are wrapped and permeated—which is universally present, namely, magnetism—a power always in operation, always in a state of activity and tension. It has an attractive power towards the surface of the earth, as well as a directive action from pole to pole. “It is, indeed,” he adds, emphatically, “the terrestrial gravitation. Magnetic needles freely suspended show its meridional or directive polar force, and that the force converges at two opposite parts, which are bounded by the Antarctic and Arctic circles.”

This polar force, like a stream, is constantly moving from pole to pole; and experiment proves that this movement is from the South Pole to the North. “Hence the various terrestrial substances, solids and fluids, through which this subtle and universal power permeates, are controlled, propelled, and modified over the entire surface of our globe, commencing at the south and dissolving at the north. Thus, all terrestrial matter moves towards the Arctic region, and finally disappears by dissolution and absorption, to be renewed again and again in the Antarctic Sea to the end of time.”

In order to prove that the north polar basin is the receptacle of the final dissolution of all terrestrial substances, Mr. Hopkins quotes the Gulf Stream. Bottles, tropical plants, and wrecks cast into the sea in the South Atlantic, are carried to Greenland in a comparatively short time. The great tidal waves commence at the fountain-head in the Antarctic circle, impinge against the south coast of Tierra del Fuego, New Zealand, and Tasmania, and are then propelled northward in a series of undulations. The South Atlantic stream, after doubling the Cape of Good Hope, moves towards the Guinea coast, bends towards the Caribbean Sea, producing the trade winds; again leaves Florida as the Gulf Stream, and washes the coasts of Greenland and Norway, and finally reaches the north polar basin.