COMPLETE.

Before concluding, it may be instructive to note a few especially
desperate attempts at truces or compromises, such as always appear when
the victory of any science has become absolutely sure. Typical among
the earliest of these may be mentioned the effort of Carl von Raumer in
1819. With much pretension to scientific knowledge, but with aspirations
bounded by the limits of Prussian orthodoxy, he made a laboured attempt
to produce a statement which, by its vagueness, haziness, and "depth,"
should obscure the real questions at issue. This statement appeared in
the shape of an argument, used by Bertrand and others in the previous
century, to prove that fossil remains of plants in the coal measures
had never existed as living plants, but had been simply a "result of the
development of imperfect plant embryos"; and the same misty theory was
suggested to explain the existence of fossil animals without supposing
the epochs and changes required by geological science.

In 1837 Wagner sought to uphold this explanation; but it was so clearly
a mere hollow phrase, unable to bear the weight of the facts to be
accounted for, that it was soon given up.

Similar attempts were made throughout Europe, the most noteworthy
appearing in England. In 1853 was issued an anonymous work having as its
title A Brief and Complete Refutation of the Anti-Scriptural Theory of
Geologists: the author having revived an old idea, and put a spark
of life into it--this idea being that "all the organisms found in the
depths of the earth were made on the first of the six creative days, as
models for the plants and animals to be created on the third, fifth, and
sixth days."(176)

(176) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 475.

But while these attempts to preserve the old theory as to fossil remains
of lower animals were thus pressed, there appeared upon the geological
field a new scientific column far more terrible to the old doctrines
than any which had been seen previously.

For, just at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
geologists began to examine the caves and beds of drift in various
parts of the world; and within a few years from that time a series
of discoveries began in France, in Belgium, in England, in Brazil, in
Sicily, in India, in Egypt, and in America, which established the
fact that a period of time much greater than any which had before been
thought of had elapsed since the first human occupation of th