... there is no reason to believe that any part of the crust of the earth, reaching even to a fathomless depth, is now in the condition in which it was originally made; every portion has been worked over and brought into new forms, and these changes have arisen from the action of those physical laws which the Creator established, and which are as truly His work, as the materials upon which they operate. The amount of time is the only difficulty, and this will vanish before an enlarged and reasonable view of the whole subject . . . ⁵

It seemed implausible, in the span of 6000 years, that the land could be eroded and the resulting sediment deposited and recast into stone. It simply was not enough time.

The occurrence of fossils and the evidence of the long time spans involved in sedimentary processes did not find a ready explanation in a strict interpretation of the Bible. New interpretations of Genesis arose. A proposition of 1820 held that each of the six days of Creation lasted a thousand years, "since with the Almighty a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years. "' When combined with Bishop Ussher's 6000 years of biblical genealogy, this extended the age of the Earth to 12,000 years. Benjamin Silliman carried this concept one step further in 1833 when he wrote that "the days of creation were periods of time of indefinite length," allowing for a world quite a bit older than 6000 or even 12,000 years.⁷

Recognition of the extreme age of the Earth was one of the most important advances of 19th-century science. It was a strong argument for abandoning a strict, literal interpretation of the Biblical account of creation (although by no means for abandoning the Bible itself). Without this recognition, another strong argument could not have been conceived: Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin thought an extremely old Earth was essential if his theory was truly to explain the origin of species. In fact, he felt that estimates of the Earth's age current in the 1860s and 1870s - ten to a hundred million years -were far too small. A more precise calculation would await the 20th century and the development of dating techniques based on radioactive elements in

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