existence. At last, on the fourth day, the sun was created, as also the 

 moon and stars, all being- placed in the firmament, between the clouds 

 and the earth, for the sole purpose of acting as lamps and marking- 

 time for this world. The writer evidently imagined that the only 

 object of the heavenly orbs is to light up this world, to divide our day 

 from our night, and to limit our seasons, being, apparently, ignorant of 

 the fact that our days and seasons are regulated by the motions of the 

 earth itself, quite irrespective of the movements of the celestial bodies. 

 He was also clearly under the impression that the sun was, after our 

 earth, the larg-est body in the universe, the moon being next, and the 

 stars the smallest ; whereas the sun is five hundred times larger than 

 the earth and all the planets and their moons put together ; while the 

 earth is about forty nine times larger in bulk than the moon ; and some 

 of the stars are immensely larger than our sun, and all of them, more- 

 over, suns themselves. 



It is sufficiently evident from this account that the world had been 

 in existence for three days and three nights before the sun was made, 

 and that vegetation had in the meantime baen produced, which is, we 

 know, an absurdity. There are some ingenious individuals who have 

 declared that this is quite possible, for there are, they sa^, lig-hts that 

 are unconnected with the sun, and that the writer evidently alluded to 

 these faint glimmerings ; but I assert confidently that, leaving- out of 

 the question the light derived from the stars, so far as we know from 

 science, there is no light known which is not either directly produced 

 from the sun, or a reflection of the sun's light from some other object. 



On the fifth day were created fishes, birds, and mammals in the form 

 of whales. Now there has been so far no creation of land animals ex- 

 cept birds, and yet the writer declares that whales were made, being- 

 clearly quite ignorant of the fact that whales are not true fishes, but 

 mammals, belonging to the sub-king-dom Mammalia, to which belong 

 also horses, cows, apes and men. Whales were not evolved until long- 

 a f ter creeping animals, such as lizards, serpents, etc., and took to the 

 water ag-ain after having been, in the parent form, long accustomed to 

 dry land, just in the same manner as did the walrus, porpoise, sea-cow> 

 dolphin and seal, all of which are mammals. It was not until the next 

 (sixth) day that creeping animals were created, according- to Genesis, 

 and yet we know well enough that they slowly evolved from molluscs, 



