Many attempts have been made to overcome the difficulty which has
thus arisen. When geologists first began to study the lessons
which are to be learnt from fossils, a suggestion was made which,
though it was soon shown to be untenable, has still perhaps a few
supporters. It was said that these fossils were not what they
seemed to be, the remains of creatures which once lived, but
simple stones, fashioned from the first in their present form by
the will of the Creator. But such an idea is at variance with all
that either Nature or Revelation teaches us concerning God. All
those who have any familiarity with the subject cannot but feel
that the suggestion of such a solution of the difficulty is little
short of a suggestion that the Almighty has stamped a lie upon the
face of His own Work.

Another proposed solution, which for a time seemed satisfactory,
assumed several successive creations and destructions of the world
to have taken place in the interval between the first and second
verses of Genesis. To these all the fossil remains were ascribed,
while the present state of things was supposed to be the result of
the operations recorded in the remainder of the chapter. But as
geological knowledge advanced, it soon became clear that there
were no breaks in the chain of life; no points at which one set of
creatures had died out, while another had not yet arisen to fill
up the void, but that all change had been gradual and progressive,
and that species still living on the earth are identical with some
which were in existence when the lowest tertiary strata were in
process of formation--a time which must have been many thousand
years prior to the appearance of man.

Other attempts have been made upon literary grounds. Hugh Miller