"[231] But the real victory was
with Brongniart, who, about 1820, gave forth his work on fossil
plants, and thus built a barrier against which the enemies of
science raged in vain.[231b]
Still the struggle was not ended, and, a few years later, a
forlorn hope was led in England by Granville Penn.
His fundamental thesis was that "our globe has undergone only
two revolutions, the Creation and the Deluge, and both by the
immediate fiat of the Almighty"; he insisted that the Creation
took place in exactly six days of ordinary time, each made up of
"the evening and the morning"; and he ended with a piece of
that peculiar presumption so familiar to the world, by calling
on Cuvier and all other geologists to "ask for the old paths
and walk therein until they shall simplify their system and
reduce their numerous revolutions to the two events or epochs
only--the six days of Creation and the Deluge."[232c] The
geologists showed no disposition to yield to this peremptory
summons; on the contrary, the President of the British
Geological Society, and even so eminent a churchman and
geologist as Dean Buckland, soon acknowledged that facts obliged
them to give up the theory that the fossils of the coal measures
were deposited at the Deluge of Noah, and to deny that the
Deluge was universal.
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