12 PRELIMINARY ESSAY. 



serve as lights : and being lights, they became further useful, by their 

 own and the earth's mutual motion, to distinguish times and seasons. 



That Moses must be understood to speak, not of the planets them- 

 selves, but only of their becoming lights with respect to the earth, is 

 evident, not only from the circumstance of his having previously mentioned 

 their creation, in the first verse, but also, from his detaching the creation 

 of hght, from what is afterwards said to be the making of the sun, moon, 

 and stars. This latter circumstance plainly shews, that Moses understood 

 light, to be quite independent of the heavenly bodies. Having therefore 

 previously spoken of the separate and independent creation of the heavens 

 and the hght, we may conclude, that in the passage under consideration, he 

 could only have intended some fresh regulation respecting them, and this 

 regulation could only have been that which he very clearly describes. 

 They became the great points from which light was to be communicated 

 to the earth *. And as by the communication of hght, they now first, 

 after the period of chaos, in which darkness prevailed f, became visible 

 from the earth, they now first, after the same period, became useful for 

 the purpose of marking the change of day and night, summer and winter. 



Whether they had ever served the same purpose before this period, 

 under any former order of tilings, it did not come within the intention 

 of the Mosaic account to declare, though nothing in that account forbids 

 such a supposition ; and it is open to the geologist to draw what inferences 

 he can, from the presumed natui-e of the fossils he meets with^, and from 

 the actual situations in which he finds them. 



* Herschel's conjecture that the sun's light is only communicated, and that it arises from 

 luminous nebulae surrounding a solid and habitable orb, strikingly illustrates this part of the 

 Mosaic account. 



-f- What may have been the state of other planets of our system during the period of 

 darkness with respect to the earth, it were equally useless and unavailing to inquire ; but I 

 cannot forbear observing, that the instances, j^r*^, of the earth itself on the original creation of 

 light, secondly, of Saturn with his ring, shew that each planet may have had light independent 

 of the sun. 



_ J I am informed that all the fruits which have been found in a fossil state are tropical. 

 This would seem to favour the presumption that the earth did not formerly receive light in the 

 same way as at present. 



