on the Gopher-wood and the Persian Gulf I 245 



plies which the country on their side of the ocean does not 

 afford them, or in emigration. But the nine generations of 

 mankind from Adam to Noah could not have so inconveniently 

 crowded the land they dwelt in, as to set themselves to invent 

 the arts and seek out means for the relief of an overburdened 

 country. Some indeed, without the slightest warrant from 

 the history, neglecting the only criteria we have in the families 

 of Noah who had but three sons, and Shem who had but five, 

 Ham four, and Japheth seven, and adopting a notion which 

 would make the wives of the antediluvian patriarchs mothers 

 of from two to four hundred children each, have filled the 

 whole earth with a swarming population *. But taking the 

 Mosaic history in its common-sense acceptation, mankind was 

 surely then in a state in which " boats and ships (and the use 

 of pitch to cover them) could be very little known." 



Mr. Beke appeals to the cognate dialects in support of 

 kopher having the meaning of pitch; but unless we are to 

 suppose this manufactured product of a tree was then in use, 

 and obtained a name before the tree whence it was taken, the 

 analogy should have been sought for in the tree itself. No 

 word will, I believe, be found for the pine or fir in any of 

 them (and in Arabic there are several) having any resem- 

 blance to kopher, which, without the slightest change of let- 

 ters, is thus made to express both pitch and a tree in the 

 same sentence, and throughout the Hebrew Scriptures is in 

 no other instance employed to signify either. 



My remark that the word expressing atonement and mercy- 

 seat were forms of the same word kopher, and that if, as in 

 Gen. vi. 14., it expressed pitch, some other word would pro- 

 bably have been chosen for those revered objects, with the like 

 import of a covering, Mr. Beke understands to convey, that 

 every root must in every case have attached to it its secondary 

 meaning. Why so ? Are a covering, a mercy-seat, and an 

 atonement convertible terms? I still think, in a religious 

 ceconomy like that of Moses, in which any association, though 

 often through a very remote idea, with things common, was 

 anxiously excluded, and all the aids, as well of the imagina- 

 tion as of the judgement, were obtained to secure the profound 



* Adam seems to have had sons and daughters after Abel, Cain, and 

 Seth (Gen. v. 4.), and all the patriarchs before Noah are said to have had 

 daughters. His are not alluded to. He seems, then, to have had none, 

 and as we know he had but one wife, he offers the best criterion. If 

 at each generation the population doubled, that is, if each pair left four 

 children, at the Flood it was under six thousand ; if it quadrupled, it was 

 under three millions to people Asia. Whiston, irt the way noticed above, 

 makes it 549 thousand millions ! (Theory of the Earth, b. iii. ch. 3.) 



