458 Bibliographical Notice. 



to us, in altered language, of his grand but vague conception of 

 earth's earliest days has been a light indeed to millions, who would 

 have had no thought of Nature's unity and order, but would have 

 lived in alternate apathy and fear, trembling at the tempest-god 

 and basking in the sun-god's rays. "Who knows how many genera- 

 tions of active, observant, meditative men, born and bred amidst 

 Asiatic and Egyptian civilization, lived and died before the fruits of 

 their observation and thought had ripened in the form that Moses 

 found in Egypt, and with which he vivified and fed the Israelitish 

 mind, giving it strength for future greatness ? Whether fashioned 

 in the visions of the night, or in the waking ecstasies of the day, or 

 worked out in cool and sober exercise of his judgment, the Mosaic 

 Cosmogony is such as the philosopher of Egypt, knowing something 

 of the nature of things, and recognizing something of the relation- 

 ships of living beings, would represent in his picture of new-born 

 Nature — the universal preceding the special, the inert preceding the 

 active, vegetation preceding animal life, the fish and bird preceding 

 four-footed creatures, and the brute beast preceding intelligent Man. 

 For he knew that the land comes from the sea, grass from the earth, 

 that water must preexist for the inhabitants of water, and that for 

 the animals that feed on grass, and for those that eat their fellows, 

 the conditions of life must preexist — that the great come from the 

 small, and that the brute, by analogy, must have preceded the 

 intelligent. 



In after ages several of the aspects, conditions, and phenomena 

 of heaven, earth, and animated nature were better understood ; and 

 in still later times a knowledge of their mutual relationships, pro- 

 bable origin, and manifold changes has been, in many cases, either 

 mastered or approached. The physician of the middle ages was both 

 hampered with the (to us absurd) notion that the Aristotelian sys- 

 tem of philosophy was perfect and not to be infringed, and further 

 fettered with the belief that all would be wrong if the Hebraic legends 

 of Nirurod, Noah, Tubal, Jubal, Jabal, Cain, and Adam were not 

 fully accepted. Nor, indeed, can we at the present day, free as 

 we are from the proofless fancies and needless errors of mediaeval 

 thinkers, separate for ourselves the useful moral lessons of the old 

 Hebrews from the long-cherished influence of their local traditions, 

 vague legends, and mythical poetry, and cease altogether to be 

 trammelled with a universal deluge, a single human race (whether 

 Adamitic or Noachian), a primeval golden age, and a " hexaemeron" 

 of creation for the universe, — all incongruous with the exact results 

 of observational, experimental, mathematical, and inductive science. 



Astronomy has corrected many of the old-world notions, and yet 

 the Mosaic writings have not lost their moral power in guiding the 

 hearts of men. Geology has proved that the readily suggested idea 

 of sea-shells and mammoth-bones having been left on high hills by 

 a deluge is totally incorrect, and that the earth's crust has been 

 formed of innumerable layers of sediment, each dating by years or 

 ages, often interrupted for long periods, and moreover warped into 

 undulations, like crumpled cloth, by the crush of slow contraction — 



