ntion, and Lyell, in his Principles of Geology
(1830), while he undermined the assumption of catastrophes, by showing
that the earth's history could be explained by the ordinary processes
which we still see in operation, yet held fast to successive acts of
creation. It was not till 1863 that he presented fully, in his Antiquity
of Man, the

[179] evidence which showed that the human race had inhabited the earth
for a far longer period than could be reconciled with the record of
Scripture. That record might be adapted to the results of science in
regard not only to the earth itself but also to the plants and lower
animals, by explaining the word "day" in the Jewish story of creation to
signify some long period of time. But this way out was impossible in the
case of the creation of man, for the sacred chronology is quite
definite. An English divine of the seventeenth century ingeniously
calculated that man was created by the Trinity on October 23, B.C. 4004,
at 9 o'clock in the morning, and no reckoning of the Bible dates could
put the event much further back. Other evidence reinforced the
conclusions from geology, but geology alone was sufficient to damage
irretrievably the historical truth of the Jewish legend of Creation. The
only means of rescuing it was to suppose that God had created misleading
evidence for the express purpose of deceiving man.

Geology shook the infallibility of the Bible, but left the creation of
some prehistoric Adam and Eve a still admissible hypothesis. Here
however zoology stepped in, and pronounced upon the origin of man. It
was an old conjecture that the higher forms of life, including

[180] man, had developed out of lower forms, and advanced thinkers had
been reaching the conclusion that the universe, as we find it, is the
result of a continuous process, unbroken by supernatural interference,
and explicable by uniform natural laws. But while the reign of law in
the world of non-living matter seemed to be established, the world of
life could be considered a field in which the theory of divine
intervention is perfectly valid, so long as science failed to assign
satisfactory causes for the origination of the various kinds of animals
and plants. The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 is,
therefore, a landmark not only in science but in the war between science
and theology. When this book appeared, Bishop Wilberforce truly said
that "the principle of natural selection is incomp