The Testimony of the Rocks: or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and RevealedMiller, Hugh
Philosophy
The Testimony of the Rocks: or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed
Miller, Hugh
Bible and geology; Creation; Religion and science
ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and dragged them down. Then
came the formation of the Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by
the waves; and last of all, the Green sand and Chalk; after which the
waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now forms the bed of
the ocean, but which previous to the cataclysm had been the place of the
land. The dean, as he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding
the true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, which
arrived in his arrangement a little too soon. He spoke, too--if a
newspaper report is to be credited--of a heavy creature soon overtaken
and drowned by the rising waters, which he termed the _pterogactylus_,
and which does not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of
it, since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he make any
provision in his arrangement for the formation of the various Tertiary
deposits. But then all these are slight matters, that could be very
easily woven into his hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill
sides, first such of the weightier animals would perish as could not
readily climb steep acclivities; and then the oxen, the horses, the
deer, and the goats, with the lighter carnivora, who, as they would die
last,--some of them not until the final disappearance of the
hill-tops,--would of course be entombed in the upper deposits. Such is
the hypothesis of the Dean of York,--a hypothesis of which it may be
justly affirmed, that it is well nigh as ingenious as the circumstances
of the case permit, and against which little else can be urged than that
it must seem rather cumbrous and fanciful to the class who do not know
geology, and, on the whole, somewhat inadequate to the class who do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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