Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

by Philip Henry Gosse

"Oh no; there have been only six-and-twenty turns altogether. Four turns had been made when you came up. The whole began by the man taking the carriage out of a box; then he set it down out there, just opposite to us, and gave it a little push with his finger, and it has been running ever since. I saw him do it."

Now perhaps you will say that a glance at the machinery beneath the table would show in a moment how many turns had been made, and how many could be made. Very true: but what if the tramp had locked up his clock-work, and would not let you look at it?

The only evidence worth a rush is that of the lad who saw the whirligig set a-going.

I wish it to be distinctly understood, that I am not proving the exact or approximate antiquity of the globe we inhabit. I am not attempting to show that it has existed for no more than six thousand years. I wish this to be distinctly stated, because I am sure I shall meet with many opponents unfair enough, or illogical enough, to misrepresent or misunderstand my argument, and sound the trumpet of victory, because I cannot demonstrate that. All I set myself to do, is to invalidate the testimony of the witness relied on for the indefinitely remote antiquity; to show that in a very large and important field of nature, evidence exactly analogous to that relied on would inevitably lead to a false conclusion, and must, therefore, be rejected, or received only contingently; received only as indicative of probability, and that only in the absence of any positive witness to the contrary.

Perhaps it may be objected, that there is no sufficient analogy between the phenomena from which the past history of a single organism is inferred, and those from which the past history of a world is inferred. Is there not?

Permit me to repeat an illustration I have already used. The geologist finds a fossil skeleton. His acquaintance with anatomy enables him to pronounce that the objects found are bones. He sees cylinders, condyles, cavities for the marrow, scars of attachment of muscles and tendons, foramina for the passage of nerves and blood-vessels; he finds the internal structure, no less than the form and surface, such as to leave not a doubt that these are real bones. Now universal experience has taught him that bones imply the existence of flesh; that flesh implies blood; that blood implies life; that life implies time. He therefore concludes unhesitatingly, that this skeleton was once alive, and that time passed over it in that living condition.

Is not this process of reasoning exactly parallel to that which he would have pursued if he had examined an animal the moment after its creation, (supposing this fact to be unknown to him,) and by which he would in like manner have inferred past time? And where is the vital difference between the two cases, which would operate to make a conclusion which is manifestly false in the one case, necessarily true in the other?

One of the most eminent of living botanists has set forth in striking terms the parallelism which I am suggesting. Speaking of the shoot as the vegetable individual, and the woody trunk as a kind of ever-accumulating ground, which supports successive generations of shoots, he uses the following comparison.

"The history of the grand development of nature on the surface of our globe presents an analogy, which may perhaps serve to set this relation in a clear light. The successive geological formations superposed during the course of countless ages, present, buried in their depths, the traces of as many formations of the organic world, each of which carpeted the then superior stratum of the earth with a new life, until it found its own grave in the succeeding formation, when a new uprising of organic life took its place. In the same way, the stem of a tree is a multistratified ground, in whose layers the history of earlier growths is legibly preserved. The number of the woody layers indicates the number of the generations which have perished, i. e. the age of the whole tree: a distinct annual ring is the monument of a vigorous season, an indistinct one of a bad season, a sickly one (which is often found among healthy ones) indicates the unhealthiness of the foliage of that particular year. The practised woodman can decipher many facts of the past in the layers of the trunk; e.g. a good season for foliage or for seed, damage by frost or by insects, &c."[98]