NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 439 



ford, chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty George II, in the pref- 

 ace to his work on The Creation and Fall of Man, pronounced the 

 whole theory "romantic and irrational." He goes on to say: 

 " The original of our speaking was from God ; not that God put 

 into Adam's mouth the very sounds which he designed he should 

 use as the names of things ; but God made Adam with the powers 

 of a man ; he had the use of an understanding to form notions in 

 his mind of the things about him, and he had the power to utter 

 sounds which should be to himself the names of things according 

 as he might think fit to call them/' 



This echo of Gregory of Nyssa was for many years of little 

 avail. Historians of philosophy still began with Adam, because 

 only a philosopher could have named all created things. There 

 was, indeed, one difficulty which had much troubled some theo- 

 logians ; this was, that fishes were not specially mentioned among 

 the animals brought by Jehovah before Adam for naming. To 

 meet this difficulty there was much argument, and some theo- 

 logians laid stress on the difficulty of bringing fishes from the 

 sea to the garden of Eden to receive their names ; but naturally 

 other theologians replied to this that the almighty power which 

 created the fishes could have easily brought them into the garden, 

 one by one, even from the uttermost parts of the sea. This point, 

 therefore, seems to have been left in abeyance.* 



It had continued, then, the universal belief in the Church that 

 the names of all created things, except possibly fishes, were given 

 by Adam and in Hebrew ; but all this theory was whelmed in 

 ruin when it was found that there were other and, indeed, earlier 

 names for the same animals than those in the Hebrew language ; 

 and especially was this enforced on sincere and thinking men when 

 the Egyptian discoveries began to reveal the pictures of animals 

 with their names in hieroglyphics at a period earlier than that 

 agreed on by all the sacred chronologists as the date of the creation. 



Still another part of the sacred theory now received its death- 

 blow. Closely allied with the question of the origin of language 

 was the origin of letters. The earlier writers had held that let- 



* For the danger of " the little system of the history of the world," see Sayee, as above. 

 On Dugald Stewart's contention, see Max Miiller, Lectures on Language, pp. 167, 168. 

 For Sir William Jones, see his Works, London, 1807, Part III, p. 199. For Schlegel, see 

 Max Miiller, as above. For an enormous list of great theologians from the fathers down, 

 who dwelt on the divine inspiration and wonderful gifts of Adam on this subject, see 

 Canon Farrar, Language and Languages. The citation from Clement of Alexandria is 

 Strom, i, p. 335. See also Chrysostom, Ilom. XIV in Gcnesin. Also, Eusebius, Preep. 

 Evang. XI, p. 6. For the two quotations above given from Shuckford, see The Creation 

 and Fall of Man, London, 1*763, preface, p. Ixxxiii ; also his Sacred and Profane History 

 of the World, 1753; revised edition by Wheeler, London, 185S. For the argument re- 

 garding the difficulty of bringing the fishes to be named into the garden of Eden, 6ee 

 Masscy, Origin and Progress of Letters, London, 1763, pp. 14-19. 



