volcanoes, the fossils of every
sort in every part of the earth, the foot-tracks of birds and reptiles,
the half-digested remains of weaker animals found in the fossilized
bodies of the stronger, the marks of hyenas' teeth on fossilized bones
found in various caves, and even the skeleton of the Siberian mammoth
at St. Petersburg with lumps of flesh bearing the marks of wolves'
teeth--all these, with all gaps and imperfections, he urged mankind
to believe came into being in an instant. The preface of the work
is especially touching, and it ends with the prayer that science and
Scripture may be reconciled by his theory, and "that the God of truth
will deign so to use it, and if he do, to him be all the glory."(177) At
the close of the whole book Gosse declared: "The field is left clear and
undisputed for the one witness on the opposite side, whose testimony is
as follows: 'In six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all
that in them is.'" This quotation he placed in capital letters, as the
final refutation of all that the science of geology had built.

(177) See Gosse, Omphalos, London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and for a
passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on
coprolites, see pp. 353, 354.

In other parts of Europe desperate attempts were made even later to
save the letter of our sacred books by the revival of a theory in some
respects more striking. To shape this theory to recent needs, vague
reminiscences of a text in Job regarding fire beneath the earth, and
vague conceptions of speculations made by Humboldt and Laplace, were
mingled with Jewish tradition. Out of the mixture thus obtained Schubert
developed the idea that the Satanic "principalities and powers" formerly
inhabiting our universe plunged it into the chaos from which it was
newly created by a process accurately described in Genesis. Rougemont
made the earth one of the "morning stars" of Job, reduced to chaos by
Lucifer and his followers, and thence developed in accordance with the
nebular hypothesis. Kurtz evolved from this theory an opinion that the
geological disturbances were caused by the opposition of the devil to
the rescue of our universe from chaos by the Almighty. Delitzsch put a
similar idea into a more scholastic jargon; but most desperate of all
were the statements of Dr. Anton Westermeyer, of Munich, in The Old
Testament vindicated from Modern Infidel Objections. The following
passage will ser