[120]. Mantell, p. 471.
[121]. The skeleton is not more than 150 years old, and is probably one of an Indian who fell in war; and has been covered with carbonate of lime, held in solution in some spring.
[122]. Hugh Miller’s “First Impressions of England and its People,” p. 362.
[123]. No sooner did geology give signs of being able to speak from her subterranean abode, and say something new about the history of this old world, than Dr. Smith was among the foremost of the geologists, intent upon the interpretation of these mysterious, and at first incoherent sounds. At times the sounds seemed unscriptural, but his faith never failed; at other times it seemed in confirmation of Scripture, and he was filled with delight. There were sepulchres older than what he had accounted the era of death, and he must solve the mystery. Mineralogy, to which from his youth he had given considerable attention, became to him history more ancient than that of Moses, and poetry more fascinating than that of Homer. His minerals became books of wonderful tales; his fossils, before riddles of nature, the pictures of things in ancient worlds. The earth was a land of monuments, and the rock which before seemed nothing more than the solid masonry of the foundation on which men might build their dwellings, became the enduring chronicle of the millions of years in which extinct ages had risen, flourished and decayed. From that time he suffered no discovery of the geologists to escape his attention; and every valuable book upon the subject in English, German, or French, contributed its supplies to mitigate his insatiate craving after further information.
Dr. Smith had another reason for devoting a large proportion of his time to geological studies. The new science had something to say about Holy Scripture. It threatened, as many understood its first ambiguous words, to contradict the book of Genesis.
Whatever affected theology was of supreme importance in the estimation of the Homerton professor. Having full confidence in the truth of God’s word, he was sure that nature and revelation, however they appeared to superficial observers, could not be really at variance. In that confidence he patiently listened to every word the new science had to say about the creation of the world. To him belongs the honour, in the opinion of the most eminent geologists, of having relieved their science of every appearance of hostility to Scripture. Of his book on this subject, Dr. Mantell said, “It is, indeed, the dove sent out from the ark of modern geology; and it has returned with the olive branch in its mouth.”—British Quarterly, Jan. 1854. Art. Dr. Pye Smith.
[124]. Gray’s Antiquity of the Globe, pp. 57–59.
[125]. Hitchcock, p. 70.
August, 1854.