Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
great piles of elephant bones showed how the beasts huddled together to face the oncoming
flood before they were swept off to Siberia. He ignored the puzzling lack of lion, zebra,
giraffe, and other bones of African animals in the Siberian deposits.
In Kirwan's mind, floodwaters racing north reshaped continents, destroying an ancient
landmass between Asia and North America and leaving Mongolia's Gobi Desert a vast bar-
ren flat. He didn't stop there, explaining how the Flood turned the Arabian Peninsula and
North Africa into wasteland, and carved out the Bay of Bengal and the Red and Caspi-
an seas. The planet's shattered crust kept settling and producing earthquakes until around
2000
BC
, creating Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and the Straits of Dover. Putrefying remains
of plants and animals sucked enough oxygen out of the atmosphere to reduce humanity to
its present enfeebled state. And because carnivores would have been hard to manage on
the ark, Kirwan proposed that God recreated them all after the Flood, along with the en-
tire American fauna. He liked this idea so much he didn't mind that the Bible neglected to
mention this second round of creation.
Although Kirwan was fervent in his desire to defend the traditional literal interpretation
of Noah's Flood, he abandoned biblical literalism to bring in additional details and events
not described in the Bible. He made up a geological story to preserve his preferred reading
of the biblical story. Others, however, began to accept an older Earth in attempts to har-
monize the biblical flood with the story told by the rocks.
Hutton's influence would withstand the test of time, but he never had a chance to respond
to Kirwan. Hutton's impenetrable topic was not compelling enough to convert skeptics
to his side. Lacking the planned third volume that was to have related his discoveries at
Glen Tilt and Siccar Point, his
Theory of the Earth
nearly died with him. Playfair and Hall,
the primary witnesses to his field excursions, would not let Hutton's work languish. They
began spreading Hutton's gospel of deep time. When sorting through his colleague's papers
while writing a memorial, Playfair realized just how much persuasive material Hutton had
been working up for his unpublished third volume.
Determined to promote his friend's ideas, Playfair did what Hutton had longed and meant
to do and completed a compelling treatise about the antiquity of the Earth. He graciously
credited his late friend by titling his work, published in 1802,
Illustrations of the Huttonian
Theory of the Earth
. Here was an impressive, engaging work that included a distillation of
