Among these mere "appearances," all created simultaneously, were the glacial furrows and scratches on rocks, the marks of retreat on rocky masses, as at Niagara, the tilted and twisted strata, the piles of lava from extinct 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.