LIGHT, LUMINARIES AND LIFE. 219 
do not see that the substitution of Aryan for Babylonian myths 
does much to clarify our idea of the “inspiration of selection” of 
prehistoric traditions.* 
That idea of Gen. iv, alluding to an “ordered state,” is an old one, 
with which I have been long familiar. Something like it is put 
forward in his Commentary by the great divine and scholar, Bishop 
Christopher Wordsworth of Lincoln. But Wordsworth was not, 
and never pretended to be, a student of science; though he main- 
tained an open attitude of mind towards the teaching of science, as 
I have reason to know. 
Lockyer’s hypothesis of the meteoric origin of planets might 
seem to favour the notion of a state of things brought about by the 
collision of two bodies moving in space ;f but if Colonel Alves will 
think the matter out, he will see insuperable difficulties in the way 
of its application ; since it would have to account for each and 
every planet of the solar system by a special event, instead of 
regarding (as the “nebular hypothesis ” does) the whole series as 
the result of the regular and simple operation of physical laws in 
their evolution, as I have attempted to show in my two papers. 
His remarks about insects and “ the higher plant-life” are beside 
the mark. If he will study what I have put forward in my former 
paper and the “analytical parallelism” there suggested, he will, I 
think, come to see that, though a few insects did exist in the Car- 
boniferous period, their agency was not required for the fertilization 
of the eryptogamous flora, which was then predominant; nor even 
was it wanted for the early forms of Conifer, which do not 
depend upon insect fertilization. 
Professor Driver’s Genesis will give him some useful information, 
as to the reasons for separating the two accounts of the Creation. 
I have long maintained that they are written from two different 
points of view: the one may be regarded as a sequential account of 
a continuous evolutionary process, while the other is a pictorial 
grouping of leading and striking facts of creation about Man, as 
the head and centre of it all. “ Image of God” in the one may, I 
* Cf. Dean Wace, D.D., on “The Book of Genesis” in Christian 
ilpologetics (John Murray, 1903). 
+ Cf. Sir Robert Ball’s lecture to the Victoria Institute in 1901. 
