Three Physico-Theological Discourses: Concerning, I. The Primitive Chaos, and Creation of the World; II. The General Deluge, Its Causes and Effects; ... and Future Conflagration

by John Ray

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496 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

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Reviews

[Sol]

"John Ray’s Three Physico-theological Discourses (1693) populates the new future’s longue durée with predictions, foreseeing erosion, rain and flood, and ‘the levelling of Mountains’ by ‘the Courses and Cataracts of the subterraneous Rivers washing away the Earth continually and weakening their foundations, so by degrees causing them to founder, subside and fall in’ [294–5]. His conclusion:

The superficies of the whole Earth which is now rough and uneven by reason of Mountains and Valleys and so only rudely Sphaerical is daily from the very beginning of the World reducing to a perfect roundness, in so much that it will necessarily come to pass in a natural way that it be one day overflown by the Sea and rendered uninhabitable. [Ray, 297]

Nor is even this oceanic catastrophe the end of it. Ray believed sunspots to constitute a progressive occlusion, such that

after some vast Periods of Time the Sun may be so inextricably inveloped by the Maculae that he may quite lose his Light; and then you may easily guess what would become of the Inhabitants of the Earth. For without his vivifick heat, neither could the Earth put forth any Vegetables for their sustenance; neither if it could would they be able to bear the extremity of the Cold, which must needs be more rigorous, and that perpetually, than is now under the Poles in Winter time. [Ray, 315–16]

The sublime gloom of this imagined future history resonates by speculating outside the possibilities of biblically sanctioned timescales." -Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction