Looking Back: An AutobiographyRichardson, Merrick Abner
History
Looking Back: An Autobiography
Richardson, Merrick Abner
Richardson, Merrick Abner, 1841-
"While the former days occupied millions of years each, this day
was not a duration of time, not even one moment. It was simply an
illustration of the then present conditions. Had we been on earth
at that time we would have seen all the heavenly bodies and their
movements just as this Bible account describes, and as we see them now.
FIFTH DAY
"As the fourth Bible day did not include time to produce geological
changes, the two ages divonian, or fish, and amphibious, or reptilian,
ages exactly fit in to make up the fifth day.
"Could we have visited the earth when it first became solid with the
sea floating over it, we would have seen at the bottom of the sea
animals of the oyster family beginning to live in their shells, which
later they took up and carried around on their backs, and now we call
them turtles. We know they were there, for they are still sleeping in
their little stone coffins on mountain tops, which God raised up when
He made dry land. God called them all moving creatures, which have
life, which, of course, included fish and frogs.
"Now hark, I will read the twentieth verse over again. There now, you
see God did not make the birds up in the mountains and tell them to
fly. He made them in the water, I guess He fixed legs where the fins
were, so they could hop and crawl, and then fixed wings where the legs
were, so they could fly, and this exactly corresponds to the reptilian
age in geology. That transformation must have made even God stop and
think, for it took millions of years. Many kinds came out of the water,
so you see we have many kinds of birds on the land. Some of them were
awfully large. One, geologists call the Pterodactyl, had a mouth and
teeth like a horse, tail like a fish or snake, and wings which he could
spread more than twenty-five feet. I imagine it flew from shore to
shore catching turtles for breakfast, who were out on the sand laying
eggs as big as our old peck measure.
SIXTH DAY
"God made cattle and all other big walking things, and all the creeping
things.
"The family of largest animals are called Dinosaur. Their fossil
bones are found in the Rocky Mountains. They must have lived there on
the plains before the upheavel of the mountains. Some of them were
about one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet high. In New Jersey,
geologists have dug up the fossil bones of an animal they call the
Iguanodon, a sort of frog with a snake tail; when he sat up his head
was about thirty feet high. Had he lived on men he would have eaten
three for dinner. It seems that when those animals raised up on all
four, like elephants, they lost their fish-like tails, except to use
as fly whiskers. Those animals lived all through what is called the
mammalian age in geology, or the sixth day in the Bible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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