Abstract
For the past century it has been one of the chief objectives of study on the part of geologists to determine the age of the earth. This interest dates from the time of Cuvier, whose philosophy on successive creations and catastrophes obviously demanded more time than Biblical chronology would allow. Cuvier's conjecture as to the age of the earth was some fifty or sixty thousand years, an estimate which must have been arrived at largely by guesswork as far as any available supporting evidence was concerned. On the basis of this same theory of repeated creations and cataclysms, Agassiz increased the length of this period to one hundred thousand years.