Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and for a while alternated for short periods between the capital and the
country. In 1650 Parliament appointed him Master of St Catharine's
College, Cambridge. He caught a cold travelling to the cathedral town
of Ely and died there on 6 December 1675; he was buried at Much
Munden.
In 1642 Lightfoot published a small twenty-page topic entitled A
Few, and New Observations, upon the Booke of Genesis. the most of
them certaine, the rest probable, all harmelesse, strange, and rarely
heard off before. He dedicated the work to his fellow inhabitants of
Staffordshire - what theymade of it is anyone's guess - and to his other
friends in London. There on page 4 is printed as verse 26: 'Man created
by the Trinity about the third houre of the day, or nine of the clocke in
the morning.' Nowhere in the slim volume did Lightfoot mention the
creation of the Earth; how later commentators mixed up this state-
ment, which concerned the appearance of mankind, with that of
Ussher's pronouncement on the creation of the Earth (which was
published eight years later) is hard to understand!
Following the appearance of Observations, Lightfoot produced
topics on Exodus in 1643 and on the Acts of the Apostles two years
later. Between 1644 and 1658 he published the four-volume series The
Harmony of the Foure Evangelists: among themselves, and with the
Old Testament. In the 1844 volume of this series, in the first part of
the Prolegom, he provided a date for Creation: 'from the beginning of
time to this fulness of it, hath laid this great, wondrous, and happy
occurrence of the birth of the Redeemer in the yeere of the world, three
thousand nine hundred twenty eight'. In fact he was more specific and
gave the actual day as the September equinox, or 12 September.
NUMEROUS CHRONOLOGICAL ESTIMATES
In 1809 William Hales documented 156 chronological estimates, and
in 1861 Leonard Horner the geologist suggested that in fact the num-
ber was closer to double that estimate. These showed a range in time
since the Creation of 6,500 years maximum to 3,600 years minimum
duration. At about the time that 4004
BC
was being bandied about,
