1825
... Earth is 6000 years old ...
Taking the bible as a source of historical information, the author of
Blair's Outlines of Chronology
presents the then-standard explanation that the
earth was created in 6
literal days about 6000 literal years ago and that the Deluge was an
historical event, since "the earth bears visible marks of having experienced
some great convulsion."
1839
... coal is the remains of pre-Deluge forests ...
Evidently reprinted from a British work,
"
The Fireside" describes
coal
and the history of its use. In a kind of tag-team lecture style common in
early works for children--including other pieces in
Parley's Magazine--a
father and mother explain to their fascinated children that coal is made up
of the remains of forests uprooted by the Deluge.
Though
mastodons had been discovered well before 1839,
"
The Mastodon" is probably the first
description of its bones published for American children--though "description"
doesn't imply that readers of the
Youth's Cabinet would
understand what the animal looked like.
1841
Robert Merry's Museum
offers young readers an articulated
mastodon skeleton and a detailed
description, in
"
The Mammoth." The piece served
to introduce a fuller discussion of fossils to appear later.
... since the beginning, many creatures have come into
existence and become extinct ...
Josiah Holbrook gives geology its due in
"
Organic Remains," which
includes illustrations of a
megatherium skeleton and explains that
animals become extinct, "to give place to other and different races, each
succeeding race being fitted to the state of the earth at the time they
inhabited it."
1842
... American children meet dinosaurs for the first time ...
Probably the first dinosaur illustrations for American children appear
in
Robert Merry's Museum,
though the word "dinosaur" isn't used to describe the
iguanodon, the
plesiosaur, or the
ichthyosaur;
"
Wonders of Geology" incorporates
material from several sources.
1849
The editor of
The Young
People's Mirror presents readers with a long list of the types of
creatures found in fossil form, in
"
Geology;" implied is that the creatures
were exactly the same as modern versions.
... gigantic birds could swallow humans as if they were insects ...
1852
... creation meets the end of the world ...
The Schoolmate
recreates fossil creatures like the
megatherium, the
plesiosaur,
and the
dinotherium in words and illustrations in
"
Wonders of Geology." Just as
the prehistoric world was remade for humans, readers are assured, so
will it be recreated again after Judgment.
1853
... geology proves that the Earth was created in six days ...
"Professor Pickaxe" explores the history of the Earth and the variety of
prehistoric life in the seven-part
"
Letters About Geology." Geology proves
that the
earth was created in 6 of "God's days" untold ages ago. The
Deluge isn't mentioned.
merrycoz.org