2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



widespread among the early peoples who attained to much think- 

 ing power was a conception that the universe arose from a watery 

 chaos, and that its inhabitants were produced by sea and on land 

 in obedience to a divine fiat. 



This, is clearly seen in the same records of Chaldseo-Babylonian 

 thought deciphered in these latter years, to which reference has 

 been made in previous chapters. In these we have a watery chaos 

 which, under divine action, brings forth the earth and its in- 

 habitants ; first the sea animals and then the land animals, the 

 latter being separated into three kinds, substantially as recorded 

 afterward in the Hebrew accounts. At the various stages in the 

 work the Chaldsean Creator pronounces it " beautiful," just as the 

 Hebrew Creator in our own later account pronounces it " good." 



In both accounts there is placed over the whole creation a 

 solid, concave firmament ; in both, light is created first and the 

 heavenly bodies are afterward placed "for signs and for sea- 

 sons " ; in both the number seven is especially sacred, giving rise 

 to a sacred division of time and to much else. It may be added 

 that, with many other features in the Hebrew legends evidently 

 drawn from the Chaldsean, the account of the creation in each is 

 followed by a legend regarding " the fall of man " and a deluge, 

 many details of which clearly passed in slightly modified form 

 from the Chaldsean into the Hebrew accounts. 



It would have been a miracle indeed if these primitive con- 

 ceptions, wrought out with so much poetic vigor in that earlier 

 civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates, had failed to influence 

 the Hebrews, who, during the most plastic periods of their devel- 

 opment, were under the tutelage of their Chaldsean neighbors. 

 Since the researches of Layard, George Smith, Oppert, Schrader, 

 Sayce, and their compeers, there is no longer a reasonable doubt 

 that this ancient view of the world, elaborated if not originated 

 in that earlier civilization, came thence as a legacy to the He- 

 brews, who wrought it in a somewhat disjointed shape and in a 

 form mainly monotheistic into the poetic whole which forms one 

 of the most precious treasures of ancient thought preserved in the 

 book of Genesis. 



Thus it was that, while the idea of a simple material creation 

 literally by the voice, hands, and fingers of the Creator became, as 

 we have already seen, the starting-point of a powerful stream of 

 theological thought, and while this stream was swollen from age 

 to age by contributions from the fathers, doctors, and learned 

 divines of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, there was poured 

 into it this lesser current, always discernible and at times clearly 

 separated from it a current of belief in a process of evolution. 



The Rev. Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, than whom no English- 

 speaking scholar carries more weight in a matter of this kind, has 



