144 INTERPRETATION OF GENESIS. 
neither the water, air, nor land population described 
in this account, refers to the origin of life, @.e., to the 
first living creatures on our globe. What right then 
has any one to say that the author of this story intended 
to speak of the first water, or land population 4 
It will add to the interest of this discussion if we go 
back farther than the work of the fifth and sixth 
periods, and note what is said about vegetation. 
I read of herbs yielding seed and fruit trees. Sucha 
flora certainly did not belong to a horizon’ where the 
highest types were alge. 
The writer names plants of the very latest order— 
that is all. But Prof. Huxley’s ‘‘central idea”? would 
add: ‘‘and there was no vegetation before that.” 
Everybody knows that there was vegetation for mil- 
lions of years before, hence Moses stands convicted of 
falsehood for what he does not say, but which Prof. 
Huxley thinks he would have said if he had said any- 
thing about it! 
Now, what are the facts of our world’s history, and 
how do these statements of Genesis fit in with them ? 
That I may run no risk of wrongly stating the con- 
sensus of geologists, I quote from Prof. Huxley’s Lay 
Sermons, No. X: ‘‘The following proposition is re- 
garded by the mass of paleontologists and geologists, 
not only on the continent but in this country, as ex- 
pressing some of the best established results of paleon- 
tology. Thus:—Animals and plants began their ex- 
istence together, and then succeeded one another in 
such a manner, that totally distinct faune and flore 
occupied the whole surface of the earth, one after the 
other, and during distinct epochs of time.”’ 
‘‘A geological fauna or flora is the sum of al the 
species of animals or plants which occupied the whole 
surface of the globe, during one of the epochs.”’ 
1 “On the same horizon” is said of fossils and strata of one age. Imperial Dictionary. 
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