23 



his purpose. Such being the case, we cannot con- 

 clude this preface without briefly stating two or 

 three methods by which any seeming discrepancies 

 may be explained. First, those who imagine that 

 the six periods of creation, mentioned in the begin- 

 ning of the pentateuch, mean literally days of 24 

 hours each, believe that, as only a small part of the 

 earth was at first required for the abode of man and 

 the higher animals, the present continents might 

 have remained as long beneath the waters, and have 

 undergone every change necessary to solve this geo- 

 logical puzzle. 



Again, others have thought that Moses, after re- 

 cording, in the first sentence of Genesis, the great 

 truth that all things were made by the will of an in- 

 telligent Creator passed silently over some interme- 

 diate state of the earth, which had no direct relation 

 to the history, or to the duties of man and proceed- 

 ed to describe the successive appearance of the pre- 

 sent order of things. On this supposition, the fossil 

 remains and peculiarities in the structure of the 

 earth may have belonged to that intermediate state. 



A third method of explaining the difficulty, and 

 which we think highly satisfactory, is, by under- 

 standing the days of creation to mean, not ordinary 

 days, but periods of time, in which the recorded events 

 took place in the order described so briefly by the 

 sacred historian. It is acknowledged by every one 

 competent to judge, that among the Hebrews, days 

 and weeks were often used in this manner. The ac- 

 cordance between the order in which, according to 



