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In the year before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Lyell, had begun that modest statement of the new revelation, that 'abstract of an essay', which developed so mightily into 'The Origin of Species'. Wollaston's 'Variation of Species' had just appeared, and had been a nine days' wonder in the wilderness.
According to Sir Charles Lyell, no devastating flood could have passed over the forest zone of Ætna during the last twelve thousand years; and the volcanic cones of Auvergne, which enclose in their ashes the remains of extinct animals, and present an outline as perfect as that of Ætna, are deemed older still.
Withdrawing to a sheltered nook away from the dizzy cliff, and so hid among the trees that all view was shut off except that scene of dazzling beauty, the glitter of the setting sun on the distant Lyell glacier, Job and Jane sat down for the first real heart-to-heart talk they had ever known in their lives.
Here, however, we have to take into consideration that important truth so well insisted upon by Lyell and by Darwin the imperfection of the geological record.
Passing the Cathedral we descend into the delightful, spacious Tuolumne Valley, from which excursions may be made to Mounts Dana, Lyell, Ritter, Conness, and Mono Lake, and to the many curious peaks that rise above the meadows on the south, and to the Big Tuolumne Canyon, with its glorious abundance of rock and falling, gliding, tossing water.
They help themselves to eternity without stint. Charles Lyell, a geologist of Darwin's time, set the example when he said, "The lowest estimate of time required for the formation of the existing delta of the Mississippi is 100,000 years." According to careful examination made by gentlemen of the Coast Survey and other U.S. officers, the time was 4,400 years a disinterested decision.
Lyell that the large quadrupeds lived subsequently to that period, when boulders were brought into latitudes at which icebergs now never arrive: from conclusive but indirect reasons we may feel sure, that in the southern hemisphere the Macrauchenia, also, lived long subsequently to the ice-transporting boulder-period.
Sir Charles Lyell has given a guarded sanction to the belief that they present one strong proof of a remote human antiquity.
These investigations convinced them that the earth must be a great deal older than was stated in the book of Genesis and in the year 1830, Sir Charles Lyell published his "Principles of Geology" which denied the story of creation as related in the Bible and gave a far more wonderful description of slow growth and gradual development.
Filled with the love of geology as Darwin was, this epoch-making book was exactly the stimulus needed. Lyell had just begun to persuade the world that to understand the past we must study the present. In the forces now at work he saw cause enough to account for all the history of the past of the earth.
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