It is astounding in the light of present-day knowledge to reflect that such correct and scientific views as to the form of the earth were subordinated, and, at last, almost entirely supplanted, by the curiously faulty conceptions of the Oriental dreamers. A chance phrase of the Hebrew writings refers to the corners of the earth, and this sufficed to promulgate a false conception of cosmology, which dominated the world for a millennium. The old Greek conception never quite died out, as the faith of Columbus showed, but it was so crushed beneath the weight of ecclesiastical authority, that it maintained existence only with here and there a nonconformist to the ideas of his time; and when Columbus and Magellan had demonstrated the falsity of the Oriental conception, and Copernicus and Galileo had further revolutionised the Hebrew conception, the advocates of the false view fought tooth and nail for a conception which had come to be intimately associated with those religious tenets which, to them, were more sacred than life itself.
Truth prevailed in the end, of course; but it was not till well into the nineteenth century that the chief supporters of the old Hebrew cosmology officially abandoned their position, and admitted that the world is round, and is not the centre of the universe.
CHAPTER IV
THE ANTIQUITY OF THE EARTH AND OF MAN
Generally speaking, the old-time nations rejoiced in their alleged antiquity. Notions as to exact chronology for long periods of time were practically non-existent. A full sense of the value of chronology as the foundation stone of history was only acquired in relatively modern times. The figures that the ancients used in referring to their national existence were very sweeping, and suffered from the same defects of vagueness that characterise their other thoughts.
Herodotus, basing his belief on what he learned in Egypt, ascribed to the Egyptians a national existence of thirteen thousand years. Diodorus extends this period to twenty-three thousand, and some other reports current in classical times increase the figures by yet another ten thousand. Even this is a meagre period compared with the claims made by the Babylonians, who number the years of their own nation in hundreds of thousands; and it is said that the Chinese, in computing their own history, do not stop short of millions of years.
The Babylonians were the astronomers of antiquity, and doubtless the less scientific Greeks regarded their knowledge of the stars as something quite occult, and were ready to believe almost any chronological statement that the Babylonians put forward. The Romans, indeed, practical people that they always were in the day of their prime, were disposed to look with more of scepticism upon such claims. Cicero announces himself as distinctly sceptical regarding the allegation that the Babylonian records extend over a period of two hundred and seventy thousand years. His scepticism, however, was probably based rather upon a shrewd common-sense estimate of human affairs than upon any preconception as to the antiquity of man. In a word, the ancients as a class had no fear of time, and most of them had no religious or other preconception that limited their estimate as to the age of a nation or the exact age of the world itself. The latter-day Hebrew was an exception to this rule. He came at last to look upon the vague historical records of his people as sacred books, inspired in their every word, and detailing among other things the exact genealogy of the leaders of his race from the creation to his own time. It is not, indeed, probable that the ancient Hebrew made any great point of the exact period of time compassed by his records, since, as has been said, questions of exact chronology entered but little into the thoughts of man in that day; but in a more recent time students of Hebrew records have attempted to ascertain the exact age of the earth and the exact period of human existence by aggregating the various disconnected records of the Hebrew scriptures, long after the modern historical method had been applied acutely to all other accessible writings of antiquity.
These writings of the Hebrews were held to constitute a class apart, and were looked to as having an authenticity not to be claimed by any other ancient documents; and while no two scholars of authority, making independent computations, were ever able to agree as to the exact facts connoted by the Hebrew chronology, yet none the less, each prominent investigator clung with full faith to his own estimate, and several of them found schools of followers who battled as eagerly as the masters themselves for the exact dates they believed to be represented by the vague Hebrew estimates. Generally speaking, these estimates ascribe the creation of the world and of man to a period about four thousand years before the Christian era; the year of the Deluge, which was supposed to have engulfed all the inhabitants of the earth except a single family, being variously estimated between the years 3200 and 2300 B.C. That some such figures as these represented the truth regarding a period of man’s residence here on the earth came to be accepted throughout Christendom as an article of faith, to question which was a rank heresy.
The larger figures which the Greeks, Egyptians, Mesopotamians and other nations had employed came to be regarded as absurd guesses, which it were a sacrilege to countenance now that the truth was known; and yet, as every one nowadays knows, these larger figures, vague guesses though they were, approach much nearer to the actual truth than the restricted numbers that supplanted them.
The changed point of view with which the modern historian regards the ancient chronology has been attained through a process of scientific development extending over about a century. A truer knowledge of the cosmic scheme did not bring with it as a necessary counterpart the correct conception as to the length of time that this scheme had been in operation.
Laplace, in formulating his nebular hypothesis, had nothing definite to say as to the length of time required for its development, and there was nothing in his computation to throw any light whatever upon the antiquity of the earth as a habitable sphere.
Cuvier, the great contemporary of Laplace, no doubt accepted the nebular hypothesis as a valid explanation of the origin of the world, but he held to the conception of about six thousand years for the age of man as rigidly as did any Middle Age monk. Cuvier was the first to demonstrate that certain fossil skeletons belonged to no existing species of animal. In other words, he believed that races of great beasts had once inhabited the earth, but no longer have living representatives. This, however, did not suggest to him that the earth had long been peopled, but only went to show, as he believed, that a great catastrophe, as the universal flood was supposed to have been, had actually taken place. It remained for Charles Lyell, the famous English geologist, working along the lines first suggested by another great Englishman, James Hutton, to prove that the successive populations of the earth, whose remains are found in fossil beds, had lived for enormous periods of time, and had supplanted one another on the earth, not through any sudden catastrophe, but by slow processes of the natural development and decay of different kinds of beings.
Following the demonstrations of Lyell there came about a sudden change of belief among geologists as to the age of the earth, until, in our day, the period during which the earth has been inhabited by one kind of creature and another is computed, not by specific thousands, but by vague hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.
The last refuge for champions of the old chronology was found in the claim that man himself had been but about six thousand years upon the earth, whatever might be true of his non-human forerunners. But even this claim had presently to be abandoned when the researches of the palæontologists had been directed to the subject of fossil man.