Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Against this view, the arguments of the so-called uniformitarians began to gain support. They argued the opposing notion, that the geological record was continuous and continuing, that there had been no great catastrophes, and that the earth we see about us was formed by natural processes that are exactly the same now as in the past and that we can still observe: rivers cutting valleys and gorges through rocks, carrying silt to the sea and laying it down as sediment, occasional volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. But these processes were and are very slow and so for the uniformitarians the earth had to be much older than it said in the Bible. Rather more important in this regard than Peyrère was Benoît de Maillet. His Telliamed, published in 1748 but very likely written around the turn of the century, outlined a history of the earth that made no attempt to reconcile its narrative with Genesis. (Because of this, de Maillet presented his book as a fantastic tale and as the work of an Indian philosopher, Telliamed, his own name spelled backwards.) De Maillet argued that the world was originally covered to a great depth by water. Mountains were formed by powerful currents in the water and as the waters receded they were exposed by erosion and laid down debris on the seabed to form sedimentary rocks.¹¹ De Maillet thought that the oceans were still retreating in his day, by small amounts every year, but his most significant points were the absence of a recent flood in his chronology, and his argument that, with the earth starting in the way that he said it did, vast tracts of time must have elapsed before human civilisation appeared. He thought that life must have begun in the oceans and that each terrestrial form of being had its equivalent marine form (dogs, for example, were the terrestrial form of seals). Like Peyrère, he thought that humans existed before Adam.

Later, but still in France, the comte de Buffon, the great naturalist, calculated (in 1779) that the age of the earth was 75,000 years, which he later amended to 168,000 years, though his private opinion, never published in his lifetime, was that it was nearer half a million years old. He too sweetened his radical views by arguing that there had been seven ‘epochs’ in the formation of the earth – this allowed more orthodox Christians to imagine that these seven epochs were analogous to the seven days of creation in Genesis.

Such views were less fanciful at the time than they seem now. The classic summing up of the ‘uniformitarian’ argument was published by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, three volumes released between 1830 and 1833. This used many of Lyell’s own observations made on Mount Etna in Sicily, but also drew on the work of other geologists he had met on mainland Europe, such people as Étienne Serres and Paul Tournal. In Principles, Lyell set out, in great detail, his conclusion that the past was one long uninterrupted period, the result of the same geological processes acting at roughly the same rate that they act today. This new view of the geological past also suggested that the question about man’s own antiquity was capable of an empirical answer.¹² Among the avid readers of Lyell’s book, and much influenced by it, was Charles Darwin.

If the gradual triumph of uniformitarianism proved the very great antiquity of the earth, it still did not necessarily mean that man was particularly old. Lyell himself was just one who for many years accepted the antiquity of the earth but not of man. Genesis might be wrong but in what way and by how much? Here the work of the French anatomist and palaeontologist Georges Cuvier was seminal. His study of the comparative anatomy of living animals, especially vertebrates, taught him to reconstruct the form of entire creatures based on just a few bones. When fossil bones came to be much studied in the late eighteenth century, Cuvier’s technique turned out to be very useful. When this new knowledge was put together with the way the fossil bones were spread through the rocks, it emerged that the animals at deeper levels were (a) very different from anything alive today and (b) no longer extant. For a time it was believed that these unusual creatures might still be found, alive, in undiscovered parts of the world, but such a hope soon faded and the view gained ground that there has been a series of creations and extinctions throughout history. This was uniformitarianism applied to biology as well as geology and, once again, it was nothing like Genesis. The evidence of the rocks showed that these creations and extinctions took place over very long periods of time, and when the mummified bodies of Egyptian pharaohs were brought back to France as part of the Napoleonic conquests, and showed humans to have been unchanged for thousands of years, the great antiquity of man seemed more and more likely.