CORRESP ONDENCE. 



843 



vindicated only at the expense of his good 

 sense and intelligence. 



Yours truly, C. M. Mead. 



Andover, Massachusetts, January 31, 1SS2. 



Messrs. Editors. 



A note in your department of correspond- 

 ence, February number, page 553, on " The 

 Duration of Human Life," by Charles S. 

 Bryant, of St. Paul, Minnesota, calls for an 

 answer. I do not undertake or need to re- 

 ply to it in full. It would be enough to 

 follow the saying, Ex uno disce otnnes. 



Says Mr. Bryant, "Seth was born when 

 Adam was one hundred and thirty years old, 

 and was his last child." He says this which 

 I have italicized, although, in the Scripture 

 account, the very next words to those con- 

 cerning the birth of Seth (Gen. v, 3) are, 

 " And the days of Adam after he had be- 

 gotten Seth were eight hundred years, and 

 he begat sons and daughters " (Gen. v, 4). 



Here I might drop the matter, simply 

 saying that this is a specimen of Mr. Bry- 

 ant's statements throughout the letter. But 

 I will follow them a little further. Mr. 

 Bryant does not pretend to question the 

 record that "Adam lived a hundred and 

 thirty years and begat . . . Seth " ; but, 

 where the account adds, as quoted above, 

 that "after this he lived eight hundred 

 years," he gives him nine years ! Now, 

 even his own so-called " rule " about the 

 Hebrew reading of " concrete " (sic /) num- 

 bers the largest, first could not twist eight 

 hundred (800) into nine (9). This " rule " 

 itself applied to eight hundred would give a 

 hundred and eight, which added to one hun- 

 dred and thirty, would be two hundred and 

 thirty-eight, instead of Mr. Bryant's one 

 hundred and thirty-nine, for Adam's life- 

 time. 



Carry out this process of examination 

 (and any bright school-boy can do it), and 

 Mr. Bryant's amazingly shrunken " table " 

 of the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs at 

 death (page 554) is, according to his own 

 (and I know not whose it is, if it is not his 

 own) " rule," elaborately wrong in every in- 

 stance. 



But, now, whence comes this " rule " ? 

 The Hebrew grammar (see Conant's " Ge- 

 senius," for instance) teaches that " when 

 units and tens are written together, the early 

 writers commonly place the units first, as 

 1 two and twenty ' ; the later writers almost 

 invariably reversing them, as ' twenty and 

 two.' " But what has this to do with writ- 

 ing hundreds, thousands, etc. ? Nothing at 

 all. The "rule" is mythic to say the 

 least of it. 



Again, that " at the date of this writing, 

 the Hebrews had no means of writing nine 

 hundred or any number of hundreds above 

 one, without repetition or circumlocution," 

 is as untrue as it is to say that we now have 



the " larger " 



the " smaller " eight. 



no such means. Ma-ah was one hundred ; 

 mathayim (a dual form) was two hundred ; 

 sh'loth ma-oth(the last a "construct form" 

 of ma-ah, one hundred) was three hundred ; 

 and so on throughout. There was just as 

 much "circumlocution" in this as there is 

 in our language, and no more. 



The fact is, that in Gen. v, 3, the Hebrew 

 says, "Adam lived thirty and a hundred 

 years (sh'loshim u m'ath shanah)," i. e., one 

 hundred and thirty years ; while in the 

 fourth verse it says, " And all the days of 

 Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight 

 hundred years (sh'moneh ma-oth shanah)," 

 with no and (u or v) between eight and a 

 hundred; and no "rule," let us remember, 

 but Mr. Bryant's fictitious one, for putting 

 number one hundred before 

 In the fifth verse, in 

 exactly the same unmistakable way, the 

 Hebrew says, " And all the days that Adam 

 lived were " (not " a hundred years and thir- 

 ty years and nine years," as Mr. Bryant ex- 

 pressly and untruly states it, but) " nine hun- 

 dred years and thirty years," just that and 

 nothing else. 



I am prompted to take the trouble to 

 write this, and ask you to publish it, because 

 the positive and yet positively false and mis- 

 leading article in hand not only might do, 

 but is doing, violence to truth between the 

 covers of a scientific journal. In the Teach- 

 ers' Institute of our city, a company num- 

 bering some two or three hundred, I had, 

 not long ago, given a summary of general 

 history, when this very article was referred 

 to by a teacher, in remarking upon the 

 exercise as perhaps affording an explana- 

 tion of, and a way to remove, the " dif- 

 ficulty " (?) in the Bible account of the lon- 

 gevity of the antediluvians. Even though 

 there were any real difficulty here (I am glad 

 to see that M. de Solaville does not feel 

 obliged to get rid of a difficulty at this 

 point, but only mentions some offered ex- 

 planations of a remarkable fact), the cool 

 fabrications of the letter I criticise are not 

 the means that would remove it. 



Albert Bigelow. 



Buffalo, New Yoke, February 15, 1S82. 



AN ELECTPJCAL NUISANCE. 

 Messrs. Editors. 



The scientists will confer a boon on one 

 of our mechanical trades if they will suggest 

 some practical solution to the following dif- 

 ficulty : Every one conversant with the ma- 

 chinery of the press-room of a large print- 

 ing establishment has heard of the great 

 annoyance caused by the generation of elec- 

 tricity while the sheets are passing through 

 a cylinder press. The action of the fluid 

 causes the sheets on issuing from the press 

 to adhere closely, and at all angles, to the 



