e earth.
The chronologies of Archbishop Usher, Petavius, Bossuet, and the other
great authorities on which theology had securely leaned, were found
worthless. It was clearly seen that, no matter how well based upon the
Old Testament genealogies and lives of the patriarchs, all these systems
must go for nothing. The most conservative geologists were gradually
obliged to admit that man had been upon the earth not merely six
thousand, or sixty thousand, or one hundred and sixty thousand years.
And when, in 1863, Sir Charles Lyell, in his book on The Antiquity of
Man, retracted solemnly his earlier view--yielding with a reluctance
almost pathetic, but with a thoroughness absolutely convincing--the last
stronghold of orthodoxy in this field fell.(177)

(177) See Prof. Marsh's address as President of the Society for the
Advancement of Science, in 1879; and for a development of the matter,
see the chapters on The Antiquity of Man and Egyptology and the Fall of
Man and Anthropology, in this work.

The supporters of a theory based upon the letter of Scripture, who
had so long taken the offensive, were now obliged to fight upon the
defensive and at fearful odds. Various lines of defence were taken;
but perhaps the most pathetic effort was that made in the year 1857,
in England, by Gosse. As a naturalist he had rendered great services to
zoological science, but he now concentrated his energies upon one last
effort to save the literal interpretation of Genesis and the theological
structure built upon it. In his work entitled Omphalos he developed the
theory previously urged by Granville Penn, and asserted a new principle
called "prochronism." In accordance with this, all things were created
by the Almighty hand literally within the six days, each made up of "the
evening and the morning," and each great branch of creation was brought
into existence in an instant. Accepting a declaration of Dr. Ure, that
"neither reason nor revelation will justify us in extending the origin
of the material system beyond six thousand years from our own days,"
Gosse held that all the evidences of convulsive changes and long epochs
in strata, rocks, minerals, and fossils are simply "APPEARANCES"--only
that and nothing more. Among these mere "appearances," all created
simultaneously, were the glacial furrows and scratches on rocks, the
marks of retreat on rocky masses, as at Niagara, the tilted and twisted
strata, the piles of lava from extinct