Hi Michael,
Be warned in the early 1800s there were many coal-pitts for people to fall
> in. It's my favourite period (see my PSCF article ofr Dec 99)
I wish I could. It is now in storage in Houston for the next 3 years.
>
> I t's also highly complex as some geologists still did not
> accept the vast
> age of the earth George Young etc and so some young earthers then changed
> their minds in a decade or so. It is far more understandable for people at
> that time to be young earth than today.
But, by the 1840s all the world class geologists had rejected the
young-earth--Buckland, Sedgewick etc.
>
> I have lots ready to be pushed out into publication. Paper due Next year
> and others in the wings.
>
> As I read you on Penn I thought of de saussure as I have visited his sites
> in the Alps and sure enough his name came up.
>
> Remember things were more fluid then (pun!), but by 1850 scarcely anyone
> and espec Anglican and Scots clergy believed in a young earth.
According to Miller, there were still what appears to be young-earthers
(although not specifically identified as such) giving lectures in Edinburgh
in 1853. He wrote
"The old theologian could scarce have held, with a living ecclesiastic of
the Romish Church in Ireland, Father Cullen, that the sun is possibly only a
fathom in diameter; or have asserted with a most Protestant lecturer who
addressed an audience in Edinburgh little more than three years ago, that,
though God created all the wild animals, it was the devil who made the
flesh-eaters among them fierce and carnivorous; and, of course, shortened
their bowels, lenghthened their teeth, and stuck formidable claws into the
points of their digits." ~ Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks,(New York:
Hurst and Company, 1857) p. 394-395
And Miller in 1857 felt the need to discuss Penn by name in his Testimony,
and he called him a 'most formidible of the anti-geologists'. see Hugh
Miller Testimony of the Rocks, (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1957), p.
405-408
Miller, (Edinburgh p.393) talks about the view of the Dean of York whose
views on the flood are interesting. He talks for several pages (pp 389ff)
about a tract entitled "A Brief and Complete Refutation of the
Anti-Scriptural Theory of Geologists', By a Cleargyman of the Church of
England. (London Wertheim & Macintosh, 1853)
He also speaks of the works of P. Mcfarlane who had some really weird
theories.
If no one believed in a young-earth in the 1850s, why did Miller feel the
need to spend an entire chapter discussing these non-existent people. I
would agree that probably no one important believed in a young-earth then,
but they were around--they always will be.
>
> I could reply at length but have exams to mark.
>
> Another point beware of the rubbish on this period published by AD White
> and also any rubbish history which says Lyell introduced ideas of the age
> of the earth in 1830 (and of course Pennock).
>
> I will put my oar in again.
>
> Keep freezing in the granite city.
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
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