# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1861_S102
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

102 Dr. Rudelbach's Childhood Years.

-tions of the Secondary and Tertiary period, strata with petrified marine organisms are often found deposited above strata with petrified land plants and land animals, it follows at most that in individual regions and areas of the earth sea or water and land have changed places several times. We say: at most. For the cogency of the proof of this requires not merely the correctness of the logical conclusion; rather, what matters chiefly is whether the premises are correct, and the correctness of these does not follow as a matter of course from the observed succession of the rock strata with their petrified organisms, but requires in addition a correct understanding of the process by which the strata were formed and of the manner in which the fossil organisms originated — two points on which geology cannot yet boast of having grasped the truth, since what is involved here, wholly or chiefly, are organisms of the lowest orders of the animal kingdom: the classes of the Infusoria, the Polyps (coral animals, intermediate beings between plants and animals), the Radiata (star-animals), the Molluscs, and certain kinds of Crustacea (e.g. the trilobites) — creatures whose still-existing host zoology has not yet even completely ascertained, nor correctly classified into classes, genera and species, let alone recognized more precisely as to their nature, origin and distribution; so that not all the conclusions which geologists have drawn from fossil remains and their traces as to the origin of the formations containing them can be held to be unconditionally correct.

At the present stage in the development of geology we may therefore confidently hold fast to those assumptions described as a postulate of Scriptural doctrine concerning creation and the primeval world, but without being able to add anything further to them beyond the general and very vague statement that, of the various petrifaction-bearing rock and earth formations, some derive from the Flood — some as its immediate product, others as its mediate effect and consequence — while others may have formed independently of that catastrophe, before or after it. More than this cannot, at least so far, be determined with even any probability, either as to the time or as to the manner of their origin and formation. — Whether geology and natural science in general, in their continuing development, will in future shed more light on this than hitherto — that the future will teach.

L.

⁂

Dr. Rudelbach's Childhood Years.

In the first quarterly number of this year of the Rudelbach-Guericke Journal there appears the beginning of "autobiographical sketches" by Dr. A. G. Rudelbach, under the title "Confessions." As is to be expected of a Rudelbach, these sketches are as interesting as they are edifying and instructive. The whole promises to become a piece of church history of the