Paradise Found, by William F. Warren, [1885], at sacred-texts.com
Paradise Found, by William F. Warren, [1885], at sacred-texts.com
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Chap. |
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I. |
THE HYPOTHESIS AND ITS ADMISSIBILITY. |
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II. |
ITS EFFECT UPON THE PROBLEM AND ITS SOLUTION. |
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When Newton said "Hypotheses non fingo" he did not mean that he deprived himself of the facilities of investigation afforded by assuming in the first instance what he hoped ultimately to be able to prove. Without such assumptions science could never have attained its present state.—John Stuart Mill. In scientific investigations it is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts it rises to the rank of a well-grounded theory.—Charles Darwin. |
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The golden guess |
From the foregoing chapters it would seem as if nearly every imaginable site for the Gan-Eden of Genesis had been proposed, examined, and found unavailable. One, however, remains,—a region of rarest interest in astronomical, physical, and historical geography,—the natural centre of the only historic hemisphere. Considering the fascination of the subject and the inexhaustible ingenuity that has been expended upon it, it seems remarkable that it should be left to the closing years of the nineteenth century to bring forward and seriously to test the proposition that the cradle of the human race, the Eden of primitive tradition, was situated at the North Pole, in a country submerged at the time of the Deluge. 1
This is the hypothesis which it is proposed in the following pages to examine and according to the evidences to adjudge. We propose to make the test both strict and comprehensive. Hypotheses, however promising, must be brought face to face with reality. Ours, like its numberless predecessors, must be rejected if the solid facts of any of the following sciences show that it is inadmissible:—
1. General Geogony, or the science of the origin of the earth;
2. Mathematical or Astronomical Geography, particularly its teachings as to the inhabitableness or uninhabitableness of the circumpolar region with respect to light;
3. Physiographical Geology, particularly its teachings as to the probability or improbability of the former existence and subsequent submersion of a circumpolar country;
4. Prehistoric Climatology, particularly with reference to the temperature at the Pole at the time of the beginning of human history;
5. Paleontological Botany;
6. Paleontological Zoölogy;
7. Paleontological Anthropology and Ethnology; and
8. Comparative Mythology, viewed as the science
of the oldest traditionary beliefs and memories of mankind. On the contrary, if the hypothesis is capable of meeting this eightfold test, and especially if we can show, not only that it is admissible, but also that in greater or less degree it is supported by the positive evidence of the facts in nearly all of these fields of knowledge, we shall afford a much more complete and convincing verification than is at all usual in matters of prehistoric research.
47:1 As to the alleged "newness" of the above hypothesis, it is proper to say that something like a year elapsed after its full acceptance and public announcement by the writer before he could find any evidence that it had ever been entertained or advocated by any other person. He then met with the allusion in the passage quoted from Bishop Huet as a motto to chapter second of the preceding part, and with a similar allusion in an anonymous article in Dickens’ All the Year Round. Whether these were more than rhetorical flourishes he was long in doubt. Not until after the manuscript of the present work had been completed, packed, and addressed to the publishers, p. 48 was the doubt resolved by finding in an anonymous English magazine article of more than thirty years ago this brief statement: "Pastellus will have it that Paradise was under the North Pole." Who Pastellus was and what he wrote upon the subject remain to be investigated. Suffice to say that up to the date of this writing the author has found no book or tractate in which the above hypothesis has ever been advocated. This fact renders some of the mottoes prefixed to the chapters farther on remarkably significant and impressive. In many cases their authors express truths which they themselves did not perceive.