The results of these contributions were most important.

In this, as in so many other fields, Augustine gave direction to the main current of thought in western Europe, Catholic and Protestant, for nearly thirteen centuries.
In the ages that succeeded, the vast majority of prominent scholars followed him implicitly.

Even so strong a man as Pope Gregory the Great yielded to his influence, and such leaders of thought as St.Isidore, in the seventh century, and the Venerable Bede, in the eighth, planting themselves upon Augustine's premises, only ventured timidly to extend their conclusions upon lines he had laid down.
In his great work on Etymologies, Isidore took up Augustine's attempt to bring the creation into satisfactory relations with the book of Genesis, and, as to fossil remains, he, like Tertullian, thought that they resulted from the Flood of Noah.

In the following century Bede developed the same orthodox traditions.( 128) (128) For Isidore, see the Etymologiae, xi, 4, xiii, 22.

For Bede, see the Hexaemeron, i, ii, in Migne, tome xci.
The best guess, in a geological sense, among the followers of St.
Augustine was made by an Irish monkish scholar, who, in order to diminish the difficulty arising from the distribution of animals, especially in view of the fact that the same animals are found in Ireland as in England, held that various lands now separated were once connected.