Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/644

626 I have been permitted to see in proof another statement from an authority still more recent, Professor Prestwich, which is now passing through the press. In it (pp. 80, 81) I find the following seniority assigned to the orders which I here name;

It will now, I hope, be observed that, according to the probable intention of the Mosaic writer, these five orders enumerated by him correspond with the state of geological knowledge, presented to us by the most recent authorities, in this sense; that the origins of these orders respectively have the same succession as is assigned in Genesis to those representatives of the orders, which alone were probably known to the experience of Adamic man. My fourfold succession thus grows into a fivefold one. By placing before the first plant-life the Azoic period, it becomes sixfold. And again by placing before this the principal stages of the cosmogony, it becomes, according as they are stated, nine or tenfold; every portion holding the place most agreeable to modern hypothesis and modern science respectively.

I now notice the points in which, so far as I understand, the text of the Proem, as it stands, is either incomplete or at variance with the representations of science:

1. It does not notice the great periods of invertebrate life standing between (1) and (2) of my last enumeration.

2. It also passes by the great age of Reptiles, with their antecessors the Amphibia, which come between (2) and (3). The secondary or Mesozoic period, says the Manual (i. 511), "has often been termed the age of Reptiles."

3. It mentions plants in terms which, as I understand from Professor Huxley and otherwise, correspond with the later, not the earlier, forms of plant-life.

4. It mentions reptiles in the same category with its mammals. Now, as regards the first two heads, these omissions, enormous

with reference to the scientific record, are completely in harmony with the probable aim of the Mosaic writer, as embracing only the formation of the objects and creatures with which early man was conversant. The introduction of these orders, invisible and unknown, would have been not agreeable, but injurious, to his purpose.

As respects the third, it will strike the reader of the Proem that plant-life (verses 11, 12) is mentioned with a particularity which is not found in the accounts of the living orders; nor in the second notice of the Creation, which appears, indeed, pretty distinctly to refer to recent plant-life (Gen. ii., 5, 8, 9). Questions have been raised as to the translation of these passages, which I am not able to solve. But I bear in mind the difficulties which attend both oral traditions and the conservation of ancient MS., and I am not in any