Noah? Adam and Eve? Vishnu? Osiris? What do they have in common? They represent eras ages apart and yet, somehow, they all join hands in the next cataclysm, and walk with us.
There are others who walk with us, too: men of science – long forgotten – those who first saw that these tumbles, these cataclysmic catastrophes, or revolutions” of the earth’s shell have happened before, countless times. J. Andre DeLuc in 1779 and Georges Culver in 1812 were the foremost. Dolomieu, the famous mineralogist, joined the consensus, as did Escher and Forel, the Swiss geologists; also J. Andre DeLuc Jr. and Von Buch. They all agreed that the cataclysms were caused by sudden revolutions in the wrong direction by the surface of the earth.
Cuvier, in his Theory of the Earth, first published in 1812, based his conclusions on his unparalleled correlative research in stratigraphy, comparative anatomy, and palaeontology. As a matter of fact, Cuvier was the founder of the science of comparative anatomy, based on his pioneering, self-taught work in that field. At that time he wrote: “Every part of the earth, every hemisphere, every continent, exhibits the same phenomenon. . . . There has, therefore, been a succession of variations in the economy of organic nature the various catastrophes which have disturbed the strata…………… have given rise to numerous
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shiftings of this (continental) basin. It is of much importance to mark, that these repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which occasioned them have been sudden; and this is especially easy to be proved, with regard to the last of these catastrophes. I agree, therefore, with MM. DeLuc and Dolomieu, in thinking, that if anything in geology be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of which ….cannot be….much earlier than five or six thousand years ago (also), one preceding revolution at least had put (the continents) under water perhaps two or three irruptions of the sea.”
“These alternations now appear to me to form the problem in geology that it is of most importance to solve in order to solve it satisfactorily, it would be necessary to discover the cause of these events…. These ideas have haunted, I may almost say have tormented me, during my researches among fossil bones………….researches which embrace but a very small part of those phenomena of the age preceding the last general revolution of the globe, and which are yet intimately connected with all the others… “
Many attempts have been made to answer the charge made to the geological profession by Cuvier to explain these sudden revolutions in the wrong direction.
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