# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1861_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

show that species are not created and unchangeable, but derived and changeable. — From these facts it is in any case clear that the current assumption — that difference of species proves different acts of creation — is by no means an established truth; just as from what is really certain about the relation of petrifactions to the mountain formations it clearly follows that the theory of several periods of the earth's formation, with repeated creations of plants and animals, can find no support in the fossil organisms."

7. "Just as little can the currently prevailing view — that fossil human remains of the same age as fossil animal species do not occur — be held as an established truth and recognized as valid proof that the fossil plant and animal species belong to a world- or creation-period preceding the creation of man, and hence that the creation of man is of more recent date than that of plants and animals. The highest British authority in geological matters, the cautious and critical Lyell, has convinced himself by his own observation, on the spot, of the genuineness of the stone human implements (axes, spearheads, hatchets, etc.) which, during the last 10 years, have been dug up in astonishing quantity from the stratified gravel beds of the Somme near Abbeville and Amiens, mixed together with fossil elephant and human bones, and reported, at last year's meeting of the British naturalists, as an established fact, that not only fossil human bones — alongside the bones of prehistoric animal species that became extinct in France before the beginning of historical times — but also implements of a savage race of men to whom the use of iron was unknown, are found in wholly undisturbed gravel strata which, in some places, have a thickness of 100 feet, belong to the Tertiary formation, and show no trace of any effect of earthquakes. This fact proves in any case that the deposit of the human remains among and between the bones of extinct animal species took place at the same time as the deposit of the latter; and from this it further follows that the occurrence of fossil remains of vanished animal species in Tertiary formations affords no valid proof that these formations came into being before the appearance of man in history."

Finally, the author remarks, among other things, the following: "A well-founded contradiction with the Bible could arise from these fossil organisms and the various rock and earth strata in which they are deposited, only in two cases: a) if the notion or opinion could be proved, or even made probable, that the globe, already on the seventh day of creation, not only had, in all its parts — seas, lakes, rivers, mountains, plains and valleys — its present shape, but had also, even then, already been covered and populated with all the species of plants and animals now existing, and hence