The structure of animal life - 1874 Author:Louis Agassiz Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. REMOTE ANTIQUITY OP ANIMAL LIFE AS SHOWN IN THE CORAL REEFS. Ladies and Gentlemen : — I propose this evening to consider a question, which has... more » long attracted the attention of the world, and led to some angry discussions, but which we must nevertheless face, like all other questions of the day, and meet openly and frankly. The question is simply this : When have the animals inhabiting the surface of the globe been called into existence? There is another question intimately connected with this, which I will take up in my next lecture, namely: In what order have those animals been called into existence ? You see at once that this question involves also the question of the age of the world. For a long time it has been believed that we knew exactly how old the world is, and that there could be no question as to its comparatively recent origin. But this impression has resulted from the fact that the chronology of the world has been confounded with that of the human race. The traditions of the relative existence of man on earth, and the history of the development of nations, have been taken as the chronology by which to measure theage of the universe. Students of nature, however, have found that the standard of human history does not apply to the history of the physical world. There are facts showing that our earth is much older than the existence of man on its surface. I propose, therefore, to consider those facts, as based upon observations of nature. And while at the outset I set aside all tradition with reference to this question, let me not be understood as supposing that there is any conflict between the narrative of Genesis and the results of scientific investigation. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." When that beginning was, Genesis...« less