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.