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There is one other class of interpreters, however, with whom I find it impossible to agree, -- I mean those who take the six days to be six periods of unknown indefinite length. This is the principle of interpretation in a work on the Creation and the Fall, by the Rev. D. Macdonald; also in Mr. Hugh Miller's posthumous work, the Testimony of the Rocks, and also in an admirable treatise on the Præ-Adamite Earth in Dr. Lardner's Museum of Science. In this last it is the more surprising because the successive chapters are in fact an accumulation of evidence which points the other way, as a writer in the Christian Observer, Jan.1858, has conclusively shown. The late M. D'Orbigny has demonstrated in his Prodrome de Palæontologie, after an elaborate examination of vast multitudes of fossils, that there have been at least twenty-nine distinct periods of animal and vegetable existence -- that is, twenty nine creations separated one from another by catastrophes which have swept away the species existing at the time, with a very few solitary exceptions, never exceeding one and a-half per cent, of the whole number discovered which have either survived the catastrophe, or have been erroneously designated. But not a single species of the preceding period survived the last of these catastrophes, and this closed the Tertiary period and ushered in the Human period. The evidence adduced by M. D'Orbigny shows that both plants and animals appeared in every one of those twenty-nine periods. The notion, therefore, that the days' of Genesis represent periods of creation from the beginning of things is at once refuted. The parallel is destroyed both in the number of the periods (thirty, including the Azoic, instead of six), and also in the character of the things created. No argument could be more complete; and yet the writer of the Præ-Admite Earth, in the last two pages, sums up his lucid sketch of M. D'Orbigny's researches by referring the account in the first chapter of Genesis to the whole creation from the beginning of all things, a selection of epochs being made, as he imagines, for the six days or periods.'
In this trenchant manner do theological geologists overthrow one another's theories.
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