eventeenth
century, when, save for a brief space long after, in the times of
Voltaire, it ceased to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously
enough, however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant
anti-geologists,--a clergyman of the English Church,--only three years
ago, in a publication written, he says, to counteract "the immense
mischief occasioned by the infidel works of geologists, _especially
among the lower classes_," and which he has termed "a brief and complete
refutation" of their "anti-scriptural theory."[37] "Fossils," says this
courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated structures:" some of
them were in all probability "formed of stone from the very first;"
others, of inanimate flesh and bone. "The mammoth found under the ice in
arctic regions had not necessarily been a living creature: it was
created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar form of
preservation, instead of being transmuted into stone, like the rest of
its class." Such was the state of keeping of this famous mammoth, when
discovered a little ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I
had occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its flesh; and
its bones, and part of its skin, covered with long red hair, are now in
the museum of Petersburg. But there is no evidence whatever, according
to this writer, that it had ever been a living creature: it was simply a
created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or archetypes,
fashioned during the first day in the depths of chaos, to typify or
foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into
existence a few days later. "What," he asks, "do the cocoa-nuts, melons,
and gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but that the
vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as well as the animal?"
Nay, further, the geologist has but got into the apartment in which the
original architect stored up his plans and models,--many of them,
however, rejected ones. For "though every animal is formed after his
archetype," we find him saying, "the converse is not true, that every
chaotic structure is represented by its living _facsimile_." But they
typify, if not living organisms, much more important things,--"they
represent," says our writer, "the land of the shadow of death;" and the
strata containing them, which geologists have opened, are symbolical of
the "gates of death." "The state of preservation in which most fossils
are, inst