Annals of Medicine, for the Year 1799

At least today we can bring some sophisticated dating techniques to the table. For most of the nineteenth century geologists could draw on nothing more than the most hopeful guesswork. The frustrating position then was that although they could place the various rocks and fossils in order by age, they had no idea how long any of those ages were. When Buckland speculated on the antiquity of an Ichthyosaurus skeleton he could do no better than suggest that it had lived somewhere between БЂњten thousand, or more than ten thousand times ten thousandБЂ«years earlier. Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt was in 1650 when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on October 23, 4004 B.C., an assertion that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since.[9] There is a persistent myth, incidentally-and one propounded in many serious books-that UssherБЂ™s views dominated scientific beliefs well into the nineteenth century, and that it was Lyell who put everyone straight ...»