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my journey, I drifted into a nearby bookseller’s,and soon chanced upon a newly published volume on geology. How close I came to replacing the book upon its shelf, considering its price too high. What drove me to make so rash a purchase? Merest chance? Or did some distant voice murmur words of encouragement? Of such mysteries are formed life itself. That same afternoon I applied myself to reading and received a mighty shock. Even in the very first chapter the author—supposedly a geologist of repute—brazenly asserted that Silurian limestone was no less than one hundred thousand years of age. This was despite the fact that the Bible tells, and with great clarity, that the earth was created a mere six thousand years ago.
    This was not mere error, this was slander. This was a most poisonous assault upon the good name of the Scriptures. As I sat thus by the fire, the cup of tea by my side grown cold, my wife working upon her knitting, needles clicking, my heart began to beat faster, and suddenly I knew myself to be in the midst of one of those rarest of moments, that are like some dazzling hilltop vista in the midst of the slow walk of life. A great truth began to pour through my soul, like some charge of electricity. All these long years in Yorkshire had not been wasted, far from it. I was simply being prepared for the great task now revealed to me: to right this terrible wrong, and prevent weak minds from being led astray by this vile falsehood.
    From that moment idle pastime was turned to deadly earnest, as I endeavoured to make a kind of machine of myself, to defend this great cause. I read every volume on the subject that I could find, only to discover that more than a few others were tainted with the same calumny as my opponent. My enemies were stronger than I had supposed. Still I strove not to lose heart, recalling to mind the story of little David and mighty Goliath. I began conducting investigations of my own, journeying even outside Yorkshire, as far as Wales and Cornwall. I studied. I pondered. I studied again. Half-formed thoughts began to crystallize into lines of reason. Vague assumptions took on a clear, fighting form. Finally I felt ready to put pen to paper and attempt my very first pamphlet, which I had printed at my own expense:
False questions honestly answered: the new theory of divine refrigeration fully explained
. Little did I imagine as I looked upon the results of my labours, stacked ready to besent to periodicals and men of influence, where these sheets of paper might finally take me. Publication is a powerful thing. It can bring a man all manner of unlooked-for events, making friends and enemies of perfect strangers, and much more besides.
    My opponents’ first argument was that the rocks of the earth—which are generally agreed to have once been in a hot and melted state—would have required far longer to lose their heat than the Scriptures described. My reply was that the earth had indeed cooled at great speed, being made possible by a process I termed
Divine Refrigeration
. Seeing as our Lord had enjoyed the power to create the world, it seemed only logical, after all, that he would also have had the power to alter its temperature. This left only the atheist geologists’ second claim, which concerned the vanished creatures. My adversaries had fussed greatly about these, especially a defunct animal named the trilobite—that resembles nothing so much as a giant wood louse—whose remains are sometimes found in Silurian limestone, and which they claimed must have existed in some long-past era. The explanation, however, seemed nothing less than obvious. The earth had originally been created with a huge variety of animals dwelling upon it, extending from the useful—such as horses and trusty dogs—to the simply ludicrous, such as this tiresome specimen. Naturally, with time, many of the less satisfactory animals—and what could be less satisfactory than a giant wood louse?—had simply