More remarkable is his attempted reconciliation of science and the Mosaic cosmogony. Chalmers had regarded the Biblical account as relating only to existing creations, and believed in the existence of a chaotic period of death and darkness between this present world and the prior geological ages. Pye Smith, on the other hand, had regarded chaos as both temporary and limited in extent, and believed that outside this area there had existed lands and seas basking in light and occupied by animals. But subsequent geological knowledge had shown that this theory of cataclysms and breaks was without evidence--many of the present plants and animals co-existing with those of the former periods; nor could Smith's theory of light existing round the coasts of the earth be brought to square with the distinct statement of the primal creation of light in Genesis. On the other hand, Miller notices that geology, as dealing not with the nature of things, but only with their actual manifestations, has to do with but three of the six days or periods. The scale of all geologists is divided into three great classes. Lesser divisions of systems, deposits, beds, and strata may exist; but the master divisions, as he calls them, are simply those three which even the unpractised eye can detect--the Palæozoic, the Secondary, and the Tertiary. The first is the period of extraordinary fauna and flora--the period emphatically of forests and huge pines, 'the herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit.' The second is the age of monsters, reptiles, pterodactyls and ichthyosaurs, 'the fowl that flieth above the earth, the great sea-monsters and winged fowl after its kind.' The Tertiary period is that of 'the beasts of the earth and the cattle after their kind.' In each age, it is true, there is a twilight period, a period of morning-dawn and evening-decline; but in the middle of each period it is that we find the great outstanding features above. Thus there would be no contradictions in the record. This, it must be allowed, summarises truly enough the process of creation; but it leaves out of sight the invertebrata and early fishes of the first period, and regards the succeeding carboniferous era as the leading features, while perhaps in some subordinate details it inverts the order of other appearances.