712 MEMOIR OF GUYOT. 



Guyot's critical eye further discovered that the two triads of days in 

 the record — the first, the inorganic, iuchidiug days oue to three, the sec- 

 ond, the organic, days four to six — have three parallel features which 

 emphasize strongly this subdivision of the chapter, aud indicate paral- 

 lel stages in the developments : first, in each triad, the work of the first 

 day was light 5 second, in each, the work of the last day comprised two 

 great works; third, the second work of the last day in each triad was 

 the introduction of an element that was to have its full development in 

 the following era; in the first triad this element was life, plants being 

 the second work and life having its chief display in the succeeding era; 

 in the second triad it was spiritual life, that of man, a planting of the 

 moral world in the material, for the exaltation of the latter in aim and 

 character. 



Guyot thus shows that the old document is philosophical in its ar- 

 rangement, true to the principles of development in history, and essen- 

 tially true in the order of its announcements, and that the best explana- 

 tion which science is now able to give on the great subject of cosmogony 

 is also that which best explains, in all its details, the first chapter of 

 Genesis and does it justice. 



I have said that Guyot, while adopting the law of development and 

 applying it to all history, still believed that true species came into ex- 

 istence only by divine act. In his later years^, as his work on " Crea- 

 tion" shows, he was led to accept, though with some reservation, the 

 doctrine of evolution through natural causes. He excepted man, and 

 also the first of animal life , for in the case of both, while science speaks 

 undecidedly, the record in Genesis teaches, by the use of bara for create 

 and by not using the word elsewhere subsequent to the first verse in 

 the chapter, that actual creation was intended. He also held that there 

 might be other exceptions ; and he objected, moreover, on other grounds 

 to the development of man through nature alone. Still, as always with 

 Guyot, God's will was the working force of nature, and secondary causes 

 simply expressions of it. 



Guyot's views on Genesis, although dating from 1810, aud presented 

 by him since that time in occasional courses of lectures, were not pub- 

 lished in detail until the last year and hours of his life. With the pub- 

 lication of the volume his work and life ended.* 



Educational Worl^ — 1849 to li84. — I pass now to Guyot's work in 

 America. His lectures at Boston were '' a brief epitome of his teach- 

 ing in Neuchatel,"t and they were, therefore, a part of European Guyot. 

 He now becomes, though European in equipment, an American in his 

 labors. 



His lectures had made him known as a geographer of the widest and 



* Creation, or the Biblical Cosmogony iu the light of modern science. 136 pp., bvo., 

 Scribner's Sons, New York, 1884. A short article by him appeared in 1873 in the re- 

 port of the sixth conference of the Evangelical Alliance, New York. 



t Letter to the writer of February 4, 1881. 



