That Old Skull by Pres. Tuttle

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 25, 1870

That Old Skull.

By Pres. Tuttle

[The following is a capital hit on that popular farce and prime minister of skepticism, geological guess-work.]

A few weeks ago, a society of scientific men met in the city of Chicago, to discuss a great variety of questions pertaining especially to the natural sciences. Pure mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, botany, geology, and some other sciences furnished themes for some truly learned papers and discussions.

It was a noticeable fact that in some of the discussions—such as astronomy and chemistry—the lecturers were very positive, as if aware their footing was sure; whilst in some others they were subdued and modest in tone, as though not so sure that all they said was true. The spirit and deportment of the association were worthy of men exploring God’s secret things in Nature.

One lecture was noteworthy. It was read by Prof. Whitney, in the elegant Baptist church on Wabash Avenue. The lecturer had his blackboard and crayon, to illustrate the geological character of the place in which was found the fragment of a skull which has become famous all over the scientific world. Aside from the skull itself, the lecture was charming in the definiteness with which it described places and phenomena of a truly extraordinary character. No one could surmise that the lecturer had any theory or pet notion to be cared for, so carefully and candidly did he state all he had learned about the locality, the strata, the mining-shaft, who owned it, who found the skull, and when, what was done with it and said about it, how it came into his hands—and, indeed, as candid and dispassionate a statement of all he knew about the relic as he could have made concerning a proposition in geometry.

The general fact thus stated and evidently believed by the professor was that this skull of a human being was found in a much lower and earlier geological formation than is usually assigned to man. He did not make the inference, but others did, that, inasmuch as human bones have at last been found in this early geological formation, they must have been there long prior to the date usually assigned as the origin of the race. The usual account, in harmony with the records of Moses, asserts that man was created about six thousand years ago; and the weight of scientific testimony thus far has been in favor of this account. Now, if human remains are found in the tertiary—when the usual account can be justified by finding them only in the post-tertiary—then we shall be compelled to give up that common theory, and with it the first and second chapters of the book of Genesis. It is a grave matter.

Some of the learned gentlemen at Chicago quite put the blush on the common theory of six thousand years as defining the time of man’s origin; and talked of thirty, forty, and even seventy, thousand years, in place of six.

Meanwhile, that old skull sat ghastly and silent on the table at the lecturer’s side. Not a word did it speak; and yet I fancied I detected a smile on its unclothed cheek-bones and jaws, to hear what the credulous savans—not the lecturer—were saying about it, as having come down from such a distant age to tell them “Moses did not know what he wrote about!”

Yes; that old skull, found down in the tertiary in that volcanic region, could not have got there by any little eccentricities of the earthquakes’ cracking the strata of the earth, to let it down where it did not belong. There it belonged, and nowhere else; and, therefore, etc.

Speaking of earthquakes. In 1755 occurred that which destroyed Lisbon. When it began to rock the earth, and the solidest buildings began to fall, thousands of the affrighted people rushed to “the marble quay which had just been constructed at great expense. It suddenly sunk with them, like a ship foundering at sea. But, when the water closed over the place, no fragments of the wreck, none of the vessels and boats near by that were drawn into the whirlpool, and not one of the thousands of bodies carried down, reappeared upon the surface. Over the spot the water stood six hundred feet deep, and beneath this, locked in the fissured rocks, in chasms of unknown depths, lie the relics of what was the life and wealth of this portion of the earth in the middle of the 18th century. These rocks are the clayey and other comparatively soft strata of the tertiary formation. When, in some future epoch, they are raised again to the surface by a convulsion of the same nature of that which engulfed them, the vestiges they contain may reappear, converted, in part or wholly, into stone, like fossils entombed when the strata were deposited.”

There sat the silent old skull on the lecturer’s table, and seemed to me to be trying to say: “By-and by, a few hundred years hence, some diver or miner will find an old skull down in the tertiary under where the Lisbon quay sunk in 1755; and some very wise men, meeting in Chicago, will say, ‘Here it is in the tertiary! It is at least seventy thousand years old! Moses wrote what he did because he did not know any better.’ And yet, gentlemen savans, that skull belonged to a live man on the 1st of November, 1755, who sunk down in an instant into the tertiary from as good post-tertiary as what you now stand on! Do not be deceived, gentlemen, for Moses will yet beat you all!”

Who knows but Prof. Whitney’s California skull found its resting-place in the same way, and as quickly? In that awful earthquake, last spring, at one of the Sandwich Islands, as our missionary, Pogue, declares, a huge volume of red mud was thrown out of the crater, at the rate of a mile a minute, three miles, and buried a whole village, in an instant, fifty feet deep. Perhaps it was tertiary mud; and by-and-by some miner may find under it some old skull, seventy thousand years old, to bear its testimony against Moses! Who knows?—Pres. Tuttle.