Geological Periods |
| Years |
|
| Hours |
|
Archæan |
| 18,000,000 |
|
| 6 |
|
Laurentian |
| 18,000,000 |
|
| 6 |
|
Cambrian |
| 6,000,000 |
|
| 2 |
|
Silurian |
| 6,000,000 |
|
| 2 |
|
Devonian |
| 6,000,000 |
|
| 2 |
|
Carboniferous |
| 6,000,000 |
|
| 2 |
|
Triassic |
| 3,000,000 |
|
| 1 |
|
Jurassic |
| 3,000,000 |
|
| 1 |
|
Cretaceous |
| 3,000,000 |
|
| 1 |
|
Tertiary and Quaternary |
| 3,000,000 |
|
| 1 |
|
The Quaternary Period |
| 72,000,000 | = | 24 |
| |
TERTIARY AND QUATERNARY PERIODS | ||||
At a rough guess, three million years may be | ||||
Geological Periods | Years | Hrs. | Min. | Sec. |
Tertiary | 2,600,000 | — | 52 | — |
Pleistocene | 300,000 | — | 6 | — |
Human | 100,000 | — | 2 | — |
Total | 3,000,000 | 1 | — | — |
Human History | 10,000 | = | = | 12 |
E
EARLY writers on the relation of man and animated nature to the material universe not only assumed that the latter existed for the former, but that both alike were the results of special acts of creation.
Furthermore, they usually took it for granted that all things were created very much in the condition in which we now see them, and that any changes that have since taken place are but slight superficial modifications of a permanent and unchanging whole. Not only were the sun and moon and stars created as appanages of the earth, but the earth itself in all its details of sea and land, hills and valleys, mountains and precipices, swamps and deserts, was made and fashioned just as we now see it, and every feature of its surface was supposed to have some purpose in connection with man.
The Old Ideas of Creation
These purposes we could, in some cases, understand, while in others they seemed wholly unintelligible, and much ingenuity was bestowed by the natural theologian and others to explain more and more of the observed facts from this point of view. The same opinions prevailed in regard to the infinite variety of animals and plants, each individual species being supposed to have been an independent creation, and all to have some definite and preordained purpose in relation to mankind.
These views, however absurd they seem to most people now, were almost universally held so recently as during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and were thus coincident with one of the most brilliant epochs of our literature and our dawning science. It was only towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, when geology became widely studied and its results were fully appreciated, that the more rational conception of a very slow development of the earth’s surface during countless ages began to be generally accepted.