Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

by Philip Henry Gosse

A writer in Blackwood (xli. 181; xlii. 690), in like manner, adheres to the literal sense of Genesis and the Decalogue, and alludes to "the great agencies—the magnetic, electrical, and ethereal influences—probably instrumental in all the phenomena of nature," as being far more powerful than is generally suspected.

Mr. Macbrair—who does not, however, appear, from the amount of his acquaintance with science, competent to judge of the physical evidence—supposes stratification to have proceeded with immense rapidity, because limestone is now deposited in some waters at the rate of six inches per annum. Because a mass of timber, ten miles in length, was collected in the Mississippi, in thirty-eight years, he considers that a "capital coal field" might be formed in a single century. Alluvial strata are mud lavas ejected from volcanoes. The whole difficulty of fossil remains is got rid of by ignoring the distinctions of species, and assuming that the ancient animals and the recent ones are identical. The Pterodactyle and the Plesiosaurus he does not allude to.[4]

According to Dr. Ure,—"The demiurgic week ... is manifestly composed of six working days like our own, and a day of rest, each of equal length, and, therefore, containing an evening and a morning, measured by the rotation of the earth round its axis.... Neither reason nor revelation will justify us in extending the origin of the material system beyond six thousand years from our own days. The world then received its substance, form, and motions from the volition of the Omnipotent."

His theory of the stratification extends over the whole antediluvian era. He supposes that successive irruptions of the central heat broke up the primitive strata and deposited the secondary and tertiary. "The basaltic or trap phenomena lead to the conclusion that such upheavings and subversions were not confined to one epoch of the antediluvian world, but that, coeval with its birth, they pervaded the whole period of its duration.... The Deluge—that universal transflux of the ocean—was the last and greatest of these terraqueous convulsions."[5]

Another class of this school of interpreters refers the stratification of the earth, either to the deluge alone, or to that convulsion conjoined with the one which is considered to have taken place on the third day of the Mosaic narrative. Perhaps the most eminent writer of this class is Mr. Granville Penn, whose opinions may be thus condensed.

He supposes that this globe has undergone only two revolutions. The first was the violent rupture and depression of the surface to become the bed of the sea, and the simultaneous elevation of the other portion to become dry land,—the theatre of terrestrial existence. This first revolution took place before the creation of any organized beings. The second revolution was at the Noachic Flood, when the former bed of the sea was elevated to become the dry land, with all its organic accumulations of sixteen centuries, while the former land was correspondingly depressed and overflowed. "The earth must, therefore, necessarily exhibit manifest and universal evidences of the vast apparent ruin occasioned by its first violent disruption and depression; of the presence and operation of the marine fluid, during the long interval which succeeded; and of the action and effects of that fluid in its ultimate retreat."[6]

Mr. Fairholme[7] so nearly agrees with the above, that I need not quote his opinions in detail.

Another class, represented by Dr. Young and the Rev. Sir W. Cockburn, Dean of York, have maintained with considerable power, backed by no mean geological knowledge, that the deluge is a sufficient vera causa for the stratification of the globe, and for the fossilization of the organic remains.

Dr. Young supposes that an equable climate prevailed all over the globe in the antediluvian period. "Were the highest mountains transferred to the equatorial regions, the most extensive oceans removed towards the poles, and fringed with a border of archipelago,—while lands of moderate height occupied most of the intermediate spaces, between these archipelagos and the equatorial mountains; then a temperature, almost uniform, would prevail throughout the world." This "perpetual summer" would account for the prodigious quantities of animal and vegetable remains:—every region teemed with life.