ABSTRACT
Consequently, in the early history of landscape studies we are faced with a strange dichotomy: the abundance of observers who recognized that erosive forces were actively fashioning the earth’s surface; and the superabundance of people who considered that the earth’s features were created in the six days of the Creation. These ideas might well have remained separate but for the great interest taken in fossils. Indeed the sea-shell on the mountain-top has been of supreme importance in the history of landscape study and may even have been of more significance than the countless early observations on the obvious erosive force of rivers and waves. It happens, however, as we have already hinted-, that ideas on erosion need not be applied universally and need not offend cosmogonists whereas ideas on sea-shells in mountain rocks involve the Creation and world floods and discussion upon them soon opens the flood-gates of theology. In this chapter we shall attempt to show briefly how some writers restricted their observations to erosion and others to fossils and how any who tried to combine speculations on both were eventually forced to reconcile landscape evolution with theological cosmogony.
