Consolations in Travel; or, the Last Days of a Philosopher

by Sir Humphry Davy

for a long while I thought volcanic eruptions were owing to chemical agencies of the newly discovered metals of the earths and alkalies, and I made many, and some dangerous, experiments in the hope of confirming this notion, but in vain.”

Amb.—We are very much obliged to you for your geological illustrations; but they remind me a little of some of the ideas of our friend Philalethes in his remarkable vision, and with which we may at some time amuse you in return for your geology should we be honoured with more of your company. You are obliged to have recourse to creations for all the living beings in your philosophical romance. I do not see why you should not suppose creations or arrangements of dead matter by the same laws of infinite wisdom, and why our globe should not rise at once a divine work fitted for all the objects of living and intelligent natures.

The stranger replied: “I have merely attempted a philosophical history founded upon the facts known respecting rocks and strata and the remains they contain. I begin with what may be considered a creation, a fluid globe supplied with an immense atmosphere, and the series of phenomena which I imagine consequent to the creation, I supposed produced by powers impressed upon matter by Omnipotence.”

Ambrosio said: “There is this verisimility in your history, that it is not contradictory to the little we are informed by Revelation as to the origin of the globe, the order produced in the chaotic state, and the succession of living forms generated in the days of creation, which may be what philosophers call the ‘epochas of nature,’ for a day with Omnipotence is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

“I must object,” Onuphrio said, “to your interpretation of the scientific view of our new acquaintance, and to your disposition to blend them with the cosmogony of Moses. Allowing the divine origin of the Book of Genesis, you must admit that it was not intended to teach the Jews systems of philosophy, but the laws of life and morals; and a great man and an exalted Christian raised his voice two centuries ago against this mode of applying and of often wresting the sense of the Scriptures to make them conformable to human fancies; ‘from which,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘arise not only false and fantastical philosophies, but likewise heretical religions.’ If the Scriptures are to be literally interpreted and systems of science found in them, Gallileo Gallilei merited his persecution, and we ought still to believe that the sun turns round the earth.”

Amb.—You mistake my view, Onuphrio, if you imagine I am desirous of raising a system of geology on the Book of Genesis. It cannot be doubted that the first man was created with a great variety of instinctive or inspired knowledge, which must have been likewise enjoyed by his descendants; and some of this knowledge could hardly fail to have related to the globe which he inhabited, and to the objects which surrounded him. It would have been impossible for the human mind to have embraced the mysteries of creation, or to have followed the history of the moving atoms from their chaotic disorder into their arrangement in the visible universe, to have seen dead matter assuming the forms of life and animation, and light and power arising out of death and sleep. The ideas therefore transmitted to or presented by Moses

respecting the origin of the world and of man were of the most simple kind, and such as suited the early state of society; but, though general and simple truths, they were divine truths, yet clothed in a language and suited to the ideas of a rude and uninstructed people. And, when I state my satisfaction in finding that they are not contradicted by the refined researches of modern geologists, I do not mean to deduce from them a system of science. I believe that light was the creation of an act of the Divine will; but I do not mean to say that the words, “Let there be light, and there was light,” were orally spoken by the Deity, nor do I mean to imply that the modern discoveries respecting light are at all connected with this sublime and magnificent passage.

Onu.—Having resided for a long time in Edinburgh, and having heard a number of discussions on the theory of Dr. Hutton, or the plutonic theory of geology, and having been exceedingly struck both by its simplicity and beauty, its harmony with existing facts, and the proofs afforded to it by some beautiful chemical experiments, I do not feel disposed immediately to renounce it for the views which I have just heard explained; for the principal facts which our new acquaintance has stated are, I think, not inconsistent with the refined philosophical systems of Professor Playfair and Sir James Hall.

The Unknown.—I have no objection to the refined plutonic view, as capable of explaining many existing phenomena; indeed, you must be aware that I have myself had recourse to it. What I contend against is, its application to explain the formations of the secondary rocks, which I think clearly belong to an

order of facts not at all embraced by it. In the plutonic system there is one simple and constant order assumed, which may be supposed eternal. The surface is constantly imagined to be disintegrated, destroyed, degraded, and washed into the bosom of the ocean by water, and as constantly consolidated, elevated, and regenerated by fire, and the ruins of the old form the foundations of the new world. It is supposed that there are always the same types, both of dead and living matter; that the remains of rocks, of vegetables, and animals of one age are found embedded in rocks raised from the bottom of the ocean in another. Now, to support this view, not only the remains of living beings which at present people the globe might be expected to be found in the oldest secondary strata, but even those of the arts of man, the most powerful and populous of its inhabitants, which is well known not to be the case. On the contrary, each stratum of the secondary rocks contains remains of peculiar and mostly now unknown species of vegetables and animals. In those strata which are deepest, and which must consequently be supposed to be the earliest deposited, forms even of vegetable life are rare; shells and vegetable remains are found in the next order; the bones of fishes and oviparous reptiles exist in the following class; the remains of birds, with those of the same genera mentioned before, in the next order; those of quadrupeds of extinct species, in a still more recent class; and it is only in the loose and slightly consolidated strata of gravel and sand, and which are usually called diluvian formations, that the remains of animals such as now people the globe are found, with others belonging to extinct species. But in none of