HOW THE EARTH WAS MADE 121 



was light separated from the darkness, precisely 

 as the Scripture writer says: one hemisphere bask- 

 ing in the effulgence of the constantly brightening 

 rays, while the other lay veiled in dense and sty- 

 gean gloom. 



And God smd: Let there be a firmament made 

 amidst the waters: and let it divide the waters 

 from the waters. 



Nothing, again, is more clear to modern scien- 

 tists than this division of the waters that now took 

 place when the vaporous zone about the earth was 

 separated into two parts : the waters that settled 

 upon the surface of the earth's crust and those 

 that floated as clouds on high. The solid globe 

 of our planet was spanned at length with what the 

 sacred writer calls "the firmament," although the 

 heavenly luminaries did not as yet shine forth in 

 it. It was evidently meant to describe the atmos- 

 phere "amidst the waters." The air, we must 

 remember, had not been from the beginning as we 

 now know it. More recent geoglogists, like 

 Chamberlain, hold that there was a time when 

 the earth had no atmosphere at all. Only grad- 

 ually, at all events, did it assume its present 

 chemical conditions, and was cleared of its noxious 

 constituents. Between the canopy of the clouds, 

 through which the light was diffused with in- 

 creasing brightness, and the ocean that hitherto 

 had covered the earth, there henceforth existed 

 what the translator has rendered by the English 



