6zo THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



ties founded on that belief, with history and prophecy obviously hav- 

 ing 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 test- 

 ed 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 i^rofesses to set out in its own way a large 

 and comjn'ehensive scheme of physical facts : the transition from 

 chaos to kosmos, from the inanimate to life, from life in its lower or- 

 ders 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 f proceeds to account for on the following among 

 other grounds : that Zoroaster was probably brought into contact with 

 the Hebrews, and even perhaps wuth the prophet Daniel ; a supposi- 

 tion which supplies the groundwork of a recent and remarkable ro- 

 mance, not i:)roceeding from a Christian school. J 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 fol- 

 low the Mosaic outline ; but it was composed at a time when the treas- 

 ure 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. 451-2), 

 considers the Mosaic writer, not pei'haps as having intended to em- 

 brace the w^hole truth of science in the province of geology, but, at 

 least as liable to be convicted of scientific worthlessness if his lan- 

 guage will not stand the test of this construction. Thus the 'Svater- 

 population " is to include "the innumerable hosts of marine inverte- 

 brated 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 Mosa- 

 ic writer ; that the recent discovery of the Silurian scorpion, a highly 

 organized animal (p. 458), is of little moment either way to the ques- 



* Acts xiv. 1 7 ; Romans i. 20. \ Note on Gen, L B. 

 X "Zoroaster." By F. M. Crawford. Macmillan, 1885. 



* //. vii. 99. I Ovid, " Metam." i. 1- 38. 



