Geological Chronology

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 8, 1870

Geological Chronology.

REV. R. PATTERSON, D. D., has been giving to the public a series of excellent articles, in which the extravagant pretensions of geology are criticised with just severity, and their absurdity made manifest to the common reader. We give extracts from his last article in the Family Treasury:

“Leading geologists, indeed, are becoming ashamed of the extravagant demands of their brethren upon time, or rather upon eternity; perceiving plainly enough that their inflated figures must speedily fall by their own bulk, if they escape the torches of the witty critics who argue that to judge of the formative period of our earth by its observed rate of present progress, is much as if one should measure a youth of six feet high, and finding that he grew half an inch last year, should conclude thence that he was a hundred and forty-four years old. Phillips, in his address to the Geological Society, therefore begs them to moderate their millions somewhat, as it is unpleasant to become the world’s laughing-stock.

“The rapidity of many geological formations, formerly assumed to have been very slow, is now demonstrated. Peat bogs, in which human remains have been found at the depth of twelve feet, whence an immense antiquity was inferred, have been found to grow a foot in five years. In thirty-six hours a green tree is converted into a fossil in California; and into lignite in a week; while before your eyes you behold the hardest porphyry converted into potter’s clay, and the hardest granite so softened by the acidulated atmosphere that you can crush it with your hand, or cut it with a knife, as easily as unbaked bread. I have seen this metamorphic action affecting all the strata of the Napa Valley.

“On the coast of England, flints have been found, the stony covering of which has so completely the aspect of ancient rock as to warrant the conclusion that they were the growth of countless ages, but on removing the flinty matrix, you find a coin bearing the head of an Edward, a James, or even a George; or a bolt or an anchor, bearing the mark of some existing firm. We have had men counting the successive thin layers of delta and sedimentary deposits as indications of so many ages; but we know now that these give no such traces, as a mass of fine clay deposited in quiet water will stratify, in a few hours, into dozens of layers.

“Colonel Foster, in a lecture before the Chicago Academy of Sciences, reported for the benefit of the three hundred thousand readers of the Chicago daily papers—informs us that in excavating the ground for the New-Orleans Gas Works, the laborers discovered the skeleton of a man at the depth of sixteen feet; and that scientific men have pronounced it fifty thousand years old, basing their assertions upon the known deposits of the delta of the Mississippi. But the actual survey of the United States engineers proves that the whole ground on which New-Orleans stands to the depth of forty feet has been deposited within four thousand years. Indeed, one may see cotton-wood saplings of six or seven inches diameter, with two or three feet of sediment above their original roots. The process of constructing the deltas of rivers has also been wonderfully accelerated by simply taking notice of a number of facts which the Lyell school conveniently ignore. Yet, in the face of repeated corrections, they go on publishing their blunders, year after year, as scientific facts. Dr. Andrews thus exposes Lyell’s enormous blunders about the age of the delta of the Mississippi:

“Sir Charles Lyell has repeatedly published his famous calculation of the age of the delta and alluvial bottoms of the Mississippi river, notwithstanding that almost every datum of his estimates has been proved to be false by the United States Army engineers, in their laborious and careful survey. Sir Charles concluded, as the result of his hasty visit to the Mississippi many years ago, that the delta and bottom lands had an age of above one hundred thousand years. From information picked up here and there, he adopted the following false data:


Area of the delta	13,600 sq. miles.
“ “ alluvial plain above, about	16,000 “
Depth of the delta	568 feet.
Annual amount of sediment brought down by the river	3,702,758,400 cubic feet.
Time required to bring earth enough for the whole delta and alluvial plain above	100,500 years.

“Almost every item here is a huge blunder. Brigadier-General Humphrey, Chief of the United States Army Engineers, with all the resources of the war Department to sustain him, has made a most thorough and exhaustive survey of the Mississippi, a work of years of toil. It will suffice to put the results of the two men beside each other for comparison:

According to Lyell.	According to Gen. Humphrey.
Time spent in the survey	A few years.
Area of the delta, square miles	13,600
Depth of the delta, feet	568
Average annual amount of sediment brought down by the Mississippi, cubic feet	3,702,758,400
Rate at which the delta is now advancing into the great gulf per year, feet	60
Age of the delta and alluvial plain, years	100,500

“It will be seen that General Humphrey’s survey shows the annual amount of sediment brought down by the river to be above five thousand times greater than Lyell stated it. It is curious to observe that the age of the delta, as calculated by the United States survey, corresponds pretty closely with the age which we calculated for the peat beds of the Somme and other contemporaneous deposits of Europe.

“Thus we might go on assaulting in detail, almost every geological computation of time, and proving the error of the computation. In some cases, these calculations prove so preposterously absurd that they become standing jests. Lyell, and a score of other savans, gravely cite the researches of Herner, who bored down seventy feet into the soil of Egypt for bits of brick and pottery, and calculated that the Nile had been depositing that seventy feet of mud over them during the last thirty thousand years. The matter was solemnly reported to the British Association, the French Institute, and not one of these learned men had common sense enough to put the question in its proper form; viz., how long will a brick-bat require to sink seventy feet into a mud-bank? All Egypt is only a vast mud-bank every year during the inundation; and the brick-bats probably reached their bed in one season. At any rate, bricks of the reign of Mohammed Ali have been found deeper than Herner’s.”