# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S74
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

74 The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation.

mammal has also already been discovered in the New Red Sandstone. Cuvier placed great weight on the fact that no fossil ape occurs in any tertiary stratum; but now extinct species of apes have been found quite far back, in India, South America, and Europe, namely in Eocene (older Tertiary) strata. For a long time much was made of the fact that whale bones had not been encountered in secondary strata, whereas Lyell's Handbook (1858) already records traces of whales in the upper greensand, that is, before the close of the secondary age."" Thus the earlier theories, inferred from a few isolated observations, are not confirmed by the continued geognostic investigations, but rather overturned as untenable. That no certain conclusions about periods of creation can in general be drawn from fossils has long since been recognized and stated by natural scientists. Thus, for example, A. v. Hoff says (History of the Natural Changes of the Earth's Surface, vol. III, p. 227 f., from the year 1834): ""If one wished to assume, with some natural scientists, that organic creation had to pass through certain stages of formation over long periods of time, that it was at first able to bring forth only simpler organisms on the earth's surface, and only gradually the more artificially composed ones: then the traces of this gradual, temporally advancing development of ever more perfect organisms would have to appear not only in the remains of the old, perished organic creation, but one would also have to perceive them in the organic creation renewed after the supposed universal catastrophe, which in our own time will presumably have reached approximately its culmination point — unless, perhaps, according to that system, the appearance of an organism still more perfect than man is yet to be expected. According to this view, in certain earth and stone strata containing organic remains, one ought to find only the remains of the simplest kinds of animals, worms and the like; in others, already those of more perfect creatures; and so, step by step, ever further, the remains of such organic beings ought to be found grouped alone and among themselves, corresponding to the formative capacity of nature at each given time. It would have to turn out that those earth and stone formations in which the remains of the less perfect creatures lie buried were indeed the oldest, and those filled with the remnants of the more perfect ones the newest. — But of all this nothing whatsoever is found.... Since one finds remains of vertebrates in rock strata to which, given all the circumstances at hand, one may ascribe a greater age than to many stone strata in which only the remains of molluscs lie buried, one may well refuse to believe in a graduated succession of productions from the less perfect to the more perfect.""

(To be concluded.)