248 On the Physical Facts contained in the Bible, 
It is thus that the Bible represents to us Him whose ma- 
jesty is above the heavens, and who humbles himself even 
when he looks upon the celestial vault. Between the ani- 
mated representations which it gives us of this Infinite Being, 
whom the universe cannot contain, and those which have 
been handed down to us by the greatest geniuses of antiquity, 
the distance is so great that no comparison can be instituted. 
It is the same with the notions Scripture gives us and what 
the ancient theogonies have transmitted respecting God, as 
with what regards the material world and its formation. 
Scripture is not less exact when it describes the different 
constellations. It represents the Pleiades as owing their 
lustre to a great number of stars placed close together. It 
speaks, on the contrary, of the stars of Orion as remote from 
each other, and in some measure, as it were, dispersed through 
the celestial vault. In alluding to the brilliant constellation 
of the Great Bear, it represents it as composed of an infinite 
number of resplendent stars. 
It is not only when considered in relation to these great 
views, that Scripture appears in harmony with the discoveries 
of science ; the fact is even more conspicuous when we regard 
the phenomena of the material world in detail. Thus, when 
it speaks of the air, it represents it as possessing a certain 
weight, and surrounding the earth in moveable layers. In 
fact in that admirable song of Solomon’s, where he describes. 
the eternity of the Infinite Wisdom, does he not tell us that 
it existed when God established the air above the earth, when 
he assigned their equilibrium to the waters of the fountains, 
and laid the foundations of the earth ¢* 
In like manner, Scripture first informed us, ‘ That God 
gave to the air its weight (mischkal), and to the waters their 
just measure.’ Yet this property of the aériform fluid which 
surrounds the earth remained unknown till the time of 
Galileo and Torricelli. Atthe most, Aristotle had but a faint 
idea of it, just as, at a later period, Seneca had some notion 
of its resilience and elasticity. 
This weight attributed to the air, has appeared so extra- 
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* Proverbs, viii. 28, 29. 
