274 THE HISTORY OF 



solid earth-crust, the previous appearance of vegetable 

 development to that of animal, and the final entry of 

 Man upon the scene, as the most perfect organism 

 that we know upon the earth, before which it is quite 

 natural to place the less perfect in a preceding, graduated 

 series. These views of the gradual formation of the earth, 

 which to the men of those days meant the world, were first 

 collected by the greatest and most intelligent brain of 

 antiquity, Moses, and delineated by him in a picture of the 

 Creation of the World. But the few features of natural 

 history knowledge which it contains, are not the grandest ; 

 the feature in which it far surpasses all other national tradi- 

 tions, is the declaration : " The earth has not existed from 

 eternal time, is not a play of blind formative forces, not a 

 product of inflexible Necessity, a Fate, but the free act of a 

 Holy Author, an eternal Love." No other race has risen to 

 the conception of Creation in this sense, for even the 

 nearest and evidently allied Brahminic tradition, is, com- 

 pared with this simple, clear idea, confused in its imagina- 

 tive portions, and obscure in the sensuous. Ever, till the 

 end of time, will it, unchanged, re-echo : " God made the 

 World !" but we are already far advanced beyond the germs 

 of natural science mingled with it. They relate, not to the 

 world, but to one of the smallest of the specks of one 

 of the innumerable little heaps of dust which dance their 

 endless circles in the ocean of ether. Of the origin and 

 development of all those millions of other larger, wondrous 

 bodies, we know nothing. Of the world, we only know it 

 is here, and now obeys simple, unvarying laws; that 

 Mosaic history of Creation has, on the other hand, dwindled 

 into One Line in the Giant Book which recounts, in time, 

 the alterations of the Created ; a line, of which we have now 

 decyphered some few more letters than were known to 



