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620 founded on that belief, with history and prophecy obviously having it for their central point. But this Chapter, at the least down to verse 25, and perhaps throughout, stands on a different ground. In concise and rapid outline, it traverses a vast region of physics. It is easy to understand Saint Paul when he speaks of the world as bearing witness to God. What he said was capable of being verified or tested by the common experimental knowledge, of all who heard him. Of it, of our Saviour's mention of the lilies—and may it not be said generally of the references in Scripture to natural knowledge?—they are at once accounted for by the positions in which they stand. But this first Chapter of Genesis professes to set out in its own way a large and comprehensive scheme of physical facts: the transition from chaos to kosmos, from the inanimate to life, from life in its lower orders to man. Being knowledge of an order anterior to the creation of Adamic man, it was beyond verification, as being beyond experience. As a physical exposition in miniature, it stands alone in the Sacred Record. And, as this singular composition is solitary in the Bible, so it seems to be hardly less solitary in the sacred books of the world. "The only important resemblance of any ancient cosmogony with the Scriptural account, is to be found in the Persian or Zoroastrian:" This Bishop Browne proceeds to account for on the following among other grounds: that Zoroaster was probably brought into contact with the Hebrews, and even perhaps with the prophet Daniel; a supposition which supplies the groundwork of a recent and remarkable romance, not proceeding from a Christian school. Again, the Proem does not carry any Egyptian marks. In the twenty-seven thousand lines of Homer, archaic as they are and ever turning to the past, there is, I think, only one which belongs to physiology. The beautiful sketch of a cosmogony by Ovid seems in considerable degree to follow the Mosaic outline; but it was composed at a time when the treasure of the Hebrew records had been for two centuries imparted, through the Septuagint, to the Aryan nations.

Professor Huxley, if I understand him rightly (P. S. M. pp. 4.51-2), considers the Mosaic writer, not perhaps as having intended to embrace the whole truth of science in the province of geology, but, at least as liable to be convicted of scientific worthlessness if his language will not stand the test of this construction. Thus the "waterpopulation" is to include "the innumerable hosts of marine invertebrated animals." It seems to me that these discoveries, taken as a whole, and also taken in all their parts and particulars, do not afford a proper, I mean a rational, standard for the interpretation of the Mosaic writer; that the recent discovery of the Silurian scorpion, a highly organized animal (p. 458), is of little moment either way to the