the new and rationality-based discipline of geology. This new science could at last thrive unmoored from the pious dogma that declared the world to be no more than five thousand years old, which had averred that fossils were objects purposefully inserted into rocks to display the works of the Almighty, and that all seismic and meteorological events, temblors, volcanoes, tsunamis, waterspouts, typhoons, hurricanes, and cyclones were events ordained by Heaven for such capricious reasons as the Divine from time to time decided.
