Other contemporary proposals for reconciling the stories of creation in Genesis with the scientific evidence included the "interval theory" or gap theory of creation, in which a large interval of time passed in between the initial creation of the universe and the beginning of the six days of creation. This idea was put forward by Archbishop John Bird Sumner of Canterbury in "Treatise on the Records of Creation". Another popular idea, promoted by the English theologian John Pye Smith, was that the Garden of Eden described the events of only one small location. A third proposal, by French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, held that the six "days" of the creation story were arbitrary and large ages rather than 24-hour periods.