ways made life a burden to Sedgwick, Buckland, and other eminent investigators who ventured to state geological facts as they found them.

These weapons were soon seen to be ineffective; they were like Chinese gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon; the work of science went steadily on.*

III. THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE, BASED ON THE FLOOD OF NOAH.

Long before the end of the struggle already described, even at a very early period, the futility of the usual scholastic weapons had been seen by the more keen-sighted champions of orthodoxy; and, as the difficulties of the ordinary attack upon science became more and more evident, many of these champions endeavoured to patch up a truce. So began the third stage in the war-the period of attempts at compromise. The position which the compromise party took was that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah.

This position was strong, for it was apparently based upon Scripture. Moreover, it had high ecclesiastical sanction, some of the fathers having held that fossil remains, even on the highest mountains, represented animals destroyed at the Deluge. Tertullian was especially firm on this point, and St. Augustine thought that a fossil tooth discovered in North Africa must have belonged to one of the giants mentioned in Scripture.†

* Prof. Goldwin Smith informs me that the papers of Sir Robert Peel, yet unpublished, contain very curious specimens of the epistles of Dean Cockburn. See also Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, Boston, 1874, pp. 139 and 375. Compare with any statement of his religious views that Dean Cockburn was able to make, the following from Mrs. Somerville: "Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science which have been, by slow degrees, vouchsafed to man-and are still granted in these latter times by the differential calculus, now superseded by the higher algebra—all of which must have existed in that sublimely omniscient mind from eternity." See also The Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick, Cambridge, 1890, vol. ii, pp. 76 and following.

For Tertullian, see his De Pallio, c. ii (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. ii, p. 1033). For Augustine's view, see Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 143.

In the sixteenth century especially, weight began to be attached to this idea by those who felt the worthlessness of various scholastic explanations. Strong men in both the Catholic and the Protestant camps accepted it; but the man. who did most to give it an impulse into modern theology was Martin Luther. He easily saw that scholastic phrasemaking could not meet the difficulties raised by fossils, and he naturally urged the doctrine of their origin at Noah's Flood.*

With such support, it soon became the dominant theory in Christendom: nothing seemed able to stand against it; but before the end of the same sixteenth century it met some serious obstacles. Bernard Palissy, one of the most keen-sighted of scientific thinkers in France, as well as one of the most devoted of Christians, showed that it was utterly untenable. Conscientious investigators in other parts of Europe, and especially in Italy, showed the same thing; all in vain. † In vain did good men protest against the injury sure to be brought upon religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to be exploded; the doctrine that fossils are the remains of animals drowned at the Flood continued to be upheld by the great majority of theological leaders for nearly three centuries as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science with Scripture. To sustain this scriptural view, efforts energetic and persistent were put forth both by Catholics and Protestants.

In France, the learned Benedictine, Calmet, in his great works on the Bible, accepted it as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, believing the mastodon's bones exhibited by Mazurier to be those of King Teutobocus, and holding them valuable testimony to the existence of the giants mentioned in Scripture and of the early inhabitants of the earth overwhelmed by the Flood.‡

* For Luther's opinion, see his Commentary on Genesis.

For a very full statement of the honourable record of Italy in this respect, and for the enlightened views of some Italian churchmen, see Stoppani, II Dogma e le Scienze Positive, Milan, 1886, pp. 203 et seq.

For the steady adherence to this sacred theory, see Audiat, Vie de Palissy, p. 412, and Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 492. For Calmet, see

But the greatest champion appeared in England. We have already seen how, near the close of the seventeenth century, Thomas Burnet prepared the way in his Sacred Theory of the Earth by rejecting the discoveries of Newton, and showing how sin led to the breaking up of the "foundations of the great deep"; and we have also seen how Whiston, in his New Theory of the Earth, while yielding a little and accepting the discoveries of Newton, brought in a comet to aid in producing the Deluge; but far more important than these in permanent influence was John Woodward, professor at Gresham College, a leader in scientific thought at the University of Cambridge, and, as a patient collector of fossils and an earnest investigator of their meaning, de serving of the highest respect. In 1695 he published his Natural History of the Earth, and rendered one great service to science, for he yielded another point, and thus destroyed the foundations for the old theory of fossils. He showed that they were not "sports of Nature," or " models inserted by the Creator in the strata for some inscrutable purpose," but that they were really remains of living beings, as Xenophanes had asserted two thousand years before him. So far, he rendered a great service both to science and religion; but, this done, the text of the Old Testament narrative and the famous passage in St. Peter's Epistle were too strong for him, and he, too, insisted that the fossils were produced by the Deluge. Aided by his great authority, the assault on the true scientific position was vigorous: Mazurier exhibited certain fossil remains of a mammoth discovered in France as bones of the giants mentioned in Scripture; Father Torrubia did the same thing in Spain; Increase Mather sent to England similar remains discovered in America, with a like statement.

For the edification of the faithful, such "bones of the giants mentioned in Scripture" were hung up in public places. Jurieu saw some of them thus suspended in one of the churches of Valence; and Henrion, apparently under the stimulus thus given, drew up tables showing the size of

his Dissertation sur les Géants, cited in Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Tératologiques, p. 191.

our antediluvian ancestors, giving the height of Adam as 123 feet 9 inches and that of Eve as 118 feet 9 inches and 9 lines.*

But the most brilliant service rendered to the theological theory came from another quarter; for, in 1726, Scheuchzer, having discovered a large fossil lizard, exhibited it to the world as the "human witness of the Deluge":† this great discovery was hailed everywhere with joy, for it seemed to prove not only that human beings were drowned at the Deluge, but that "there were giants in those days." Cheered by the applause thus gained, he determined to make the theological position impregnable. Mixing together various texts of Scripture with notions derived from the philosophy of Descartes and the speculations of Whiston, he developed the theory that "the fountains of the great deep" were broken up by the direct physical action of the hand of God, which, being literally applied to the axis of the earth, suddenly stopped the earth's rotation, broke up "the fountains of the great deep," spilled the water therein contained, and produced the Deluge. But his service to sacred science did not end here, for he prepared an edition of the Bible, in which magnificent engravings in great number illustrated his view and enforced it upon all readers. Of these engravings no less than thirty-four were devoted to the Deluge alone. ‡

* See Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 56; also Geoffroy St.-Hilaire, cited by Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Teratologiques, p. 190.

Homo diluvii testis.

See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 172; also Scheuchzer, Physica Sacra, Augustæ Vindel. et Ulmæ, 1732. For the ancient belief regarding giants, see Leopardi, Saggio. For accounts of the views of Mazurier and Scheuchzer, see Cuvier; also Büchner, Man in Past, Present, and Future, English translation, pp. 235, 236. For Increase Mather's views, see Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv, p. 85. As to similar fossils sent from New York to the Royal Society as remains of giants, see For Father Torrubia and his Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 421. Gigantologia Española, see D'Archiac, Introduction à l'Étude de la Paléontologie For admirable summaries, see Lyell, PrinStratigraphique, Paris, 1864, p. 201. ciples of Geology, London, 1867; D'Archiac, Géologie et Paléontologie, Paris, 1866; Pictet, Traité de Paléontologie, Paris, 1853; Vezian, Prodrome de la Géologie, Paris, 1863; Haeckel, History of Creation, English translation, New York, 1876, chap. iii; and for recent progress, Prof. O. S. Marsh's Address on the History and Methods of Paleontology.

In the midst all this came an episode very comical but very instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the deductions of science to meet the exigencies of dogma may mislead heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy.

About the year 1760 news of the discovery of marine fossils in various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. He, too, had a theologic system to support, though his system was opposed to that of the sacred books of the Hebrews; and, fearing that these new discoveries might be used to support the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge, all his wisdom and wit were compacted into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by travellers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that the fossil bones found between Paris and Étampes were parts of a skeleton belonging to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher. Through chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed necessities of his theology, fought desperately the growing results of the geologic investigations of his time.*

But far more prejudicial to Christianity was the continued effort on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by the Deluge of Noah.

No supposition was too violent to support this theory, which was considered vital to the Bible. By taking the mere husks and rinds of biblical truth for truth itself, by taking sacred poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it, the followers of Burnet, Whiston, and Woodward built up systems which bear to real geology much the same relation that the Christian Topography of Cosmas bears to real geography. In vain were exhibited the absolute geological, zoological, astronomical proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any large part of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand or sixty thousand years; in vain did so enlightened a churchman as Bishop Clayton declare that the Deluge could not have extended

* See Voltaire, Dissertation sur les Changements arrivés dans notre Globe; also Voltaire, Les Singularités de la Nature, chap. xii; also Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii, p. 328.