180 REV. A. IRVING, D.SC., B.A., ON 
come, and it seems to have taken away the breath of a Cam- 
bridge Professor of Divinity, who writes to me:—“I am 
confident that the doctrine of a ‘pre-Adamite man’ is not the 
doctrine of the Bible.” If by that is meant that the early 
chapters of the Bible are primarily concerned with the develop- 
ment of the race of Adam, centering itself at the Call of Abraham 
upon the chosen people and its history, to whom the special 
revelation was given, we may I think agree. But while we 
recognise that as “the doctrine” of the Bible, we may surely at 
the same time look for agreement between the glimpses given to 
us of earlier races, in those parenthetical verses (iv, 16-24) and 
what anthropological science has revealed to us of prehistoric 
man. It is therefore somewhat startling to find Professor 
Driver* writing, “ Who could there have been to slay Cain ? 
According to the existing Book of Genesis there could have 
been no one”! Yet the Book tells us that he found a people, 
among whom he took a wife, at a distance from his paternal 
home, in the land of the Nadu, “the wanderers,” the nomads, 
as the Stone Men undoubtedly were. This fact is blinked, and 
then the inferencef is suggested that “ Cain ” is “a figure which 
belonged to a much later stage in the history of mankind.” 
The speculations on this subject given in Dr, Driver’s learned 
work are not very conclusive. He points to an “ inconsistency, 
of which the narrator is evidently unconscious” ; on which it is 
fair to ask why he should have been conscious of the “ incon- 
sistency,” which is read into his narrative by the critics, who 
refuse to recognise (as he does) the existence of a pre-Adamic 
race? With this may be compared the preface to the story of 
Noah and the Flood contained in Genesis vi, 1-8, on which 
some interesting remarks by Mr. Henry Proctorf are very sug- 
gestive, although some adverse criticisms of Mr. Proctor’s 
“ Hebrew ” have reached me from Cambridge. 
At the time when my previous paper was read I was further 
taken to task by two ot my critics, neither of whom is very 
prominent in the world of letters, for speaking of the Genesis 
account as a “poem,”§ as if they had never heard of “ poems 
in prose.” Yet so distinguished a scholar as the Dean of 
Lincoln did not hesitate to write to me at the time: “The 
* The Book of Genesis (5th ed., 1906), p. 67. 
t+ Op. cit., p. 72. 
f See Trans. of Vict. Inst., vol. xl, pp. 74, 75. Discussion of 
Professor G. F. Wright’s paper on “The Influence of the Glacial Epoch 
upon the Early History of Mankind.” 
§ See 7rans. Vict. Inst., vol. xxxviti. 
