Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 95, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 April 1910 — A Scriptural Explanation. [ARTICLE]

A Scriptural Explanation.

When William Pengelly was a sailor boy, weather-bound on the coast of Devonshire, he had his earliest geological experience, and S. BaringGould, the author of “Cornish Characters and Strange Events,” says he was wont to relate it as printed below. I received my first lesson in geology at Lyme Regis very soon after I had entered my teens. A laborer, whom I was observing, accidentally broke a large stone of blue Has and thus disclosed a fine ammonite—the first fossil I had ever seen or heard of. “What’s that?” I exclaimed. “If you read your Bible you’d know what ’tis,” said the workman, somewhat scornfully. “I have'read my Bible. But what has that to do with it?” "In the Bible we're told there was once a flood that covered all the world. At that time all the rocks were mud, and the different things that were drowned were buried in it, and there’s a snake that was buried that way. There are lots of ’em, and other things besides, in the rocks and stones hereabouts.” “A snake! But where’s the head?” “You must read the Bible, I tell ’ee, and then you’ll find out why 'tis some of the snakes ain’t got no heads. We’re told there that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head; that’s how ’tis.”