p. 59 | Geological Riddles

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 5, 1873

Geological Riddles.

A CORRESPONDENT of the United Presbyterian, writing from Colorado, gives some curious accounts of the geological structure of the mountains near Denver, in the following extract:—

The South Park is about from twelve to twenty-five miles wide, and forty or fifty feet long. It is probably the bed of some ancient lake. But you can’t tell anything about this country. It has evidently been once all torn to pieces by volcanic action. Coal beds are vertical or perpendicular, in veins like silver or gold lodes. Some of them have been sunk to a depth of one or two hundred feet, and I don’t know how much deeper they go. Where a geologist would expect to find the first limestone, he will as likely as not find granite, and where his science or books tell him to look for granite, he is just as likely to find the old red sandstone, porphyry, or slate, or flint, or something else.

I know an English geologist here who has sunk several holes from two hundred to two thousand feet deep, and he says, as the result of his experiments, that in this country there is no reliance to be placed in the commonly received doctrines of geology. Well, if geology will not tell the truth here, must Moses be put down as untruthful, merely because “scientists,” falsely so called, affirm that geology and the Bible are at variance? I know a place not ten miles from here where there is malachite now in a formation state. Two years ago it was softer than putty. At present it is quite hard. If it hardens as fast for two years more, it will be as hard as agate or jasper. Then let one of the self-conceited “scientists” of the present day look at it. He will put on his glasses and look wise and say: “Well, that’s malachite (from the Greek malachae). It is a native carbonate of copper; it occurs in mammillary masses, consisting of concentric layers having a fibrous structure,” etc., etc. Then he tells its age, perhaps five or ten thousand years, with as much confidence or positiveness and pretence of philosophy as if he really knew much about it, and with the same positiveness he will turn around and say, These things being so, the Bible must necessarily be a humbug. I could then tell him that I wrote my name in that malachite only four years ago, when it was as soft as mud and as pliable as his science.