The story of the Deluge was held to furnish sufficing explanation of the organic remains yielded by the rocks, but failing this, a multitude of fantastic theories were at hand to explain the fossils. They were said to be due to a "formative quality" in the soil; to its "plastic virtue"; to a "lapidific juice"; to the "fermentation of fatty matter"; to "the influence of the heavenly bodies," or, as the late eminent naturalist, Philip Gosse, seriously suggested in his whimsical book Omphalos: an Attempt to untie the Geological Knot, they were but simulacra wherewith a mocking Deity rebuked the curiosity of man. Every explanation, save the right and obvious one, had its defenders, because it was essential to support some theory to rebut the evidence supplied by remains of animals as to the existence of death in the world before the fall of Adam. Otherwise, the statements in the Old Testament, on which the Pauline reasoning rested, were baseless, and to discredit these was to undermine the authority of the Scriptures from Genesis to the Apocalypse. No wonder, therefore, that theology was up in arms, or that it saw in geology a deadlier foe than astronomy had seemed to be in ages past. The Sorbonne, or Faculty of Theology, in Paris burnt the books of the geologists, banished their authors, and, in the case of Buffon, the famous naturalist, condemned him to retract the awful heresy, which was declared "contrary to the creed of the Church," contained in these words: "The waters of the sea have produced the mountains and valleys of the land; the waters of the heavens, reducing all to a level, will at last deliver the whole land over to the sea, and the sea successively prevailing over the land, will leave dry new continents like those which we inhabit." So the old man repeated the submission of Galileo, and published his recantation: "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." That was in the year 1751.