GEOLOGY IN GENESIS. 27 



The word "firmament" originally means, not something solid, but an ex- 

 panse, and doubtless here refers to the open space occupied by the heavenly 

 bodies, perhaps both in and out of the solar system. The word is evidently used 

 in a more restricted sense in recording the work of the fourth day. There it 

 has reference to the space occupied by the Sun and Moon ; and in the fifth day, 

 to our atmosphere in which birds and insects fly. As to what is meant by divid- 

 ing " the waters from the waters," there has been much difference of opinion. 

 While most understand by it the separation of seas from clouds by precipitation 

 of the moisture, and the clearing up of mist in our atmosphere, the idea of Dana 

 that then the "planets were invidualized," and of Mitchell that the matter they 

 now contain was then collected around centers of aggregation, seem more reason- 

 able. 



The same difficulty occurs in defining satisfactorily the waters under and 

 and above the firmament. They are commonly understood to mean respectively 

 seas and clouds, and plausibility for this view is given in verse nine when the 

 waters under the Heavens were gathered into one place and the dry land was 

 made to appear. But doubtless the most satisfactory interpretation is to consider 

 the waters under the firmament as the nebulous matter, out of which our earth was 

 formed, separate and distinct from the other members of the solar system, and 

 these as the waters above the firmament. For, from the conditions of the nebu- 

 lous mass of dead matter uniformly diffused in space just vivified with powers of 

 attraction and motion, and having just manifested the result of its first molecular 

 activity in the first appearance of light, before it had contracted, before a single 

 planet had separated from the parent mass, the transition seems too abrupt to 

 pass all at once to the time when the Earth had already left the solar mass, had 

 concentrated from its original ring, thrown off its Moon, contracted to its present 

 size, and cooled till its aqueous vapor had been precipitated to its surface. Again, 

 if the the separation of these waters referred to the clearing up of mists in the 

 Earth's atmosphere, why should not the Sun and Moon have become visible at once 

 instead of two days later? So slow a progression of events from the second to the 

 fourth creative day seems strangely out of harmony with their rapid progression 

 between the first and second days, of which, if the generally accepted view is 

 correct, Moses makes no record whatever. Hence I conclude that this separa- 

 tion and concentration of matter so as to leave the firmament, or empty space, 

 between the planets of the solar system, was the work of the second day. 



As the statement, " God saw that it was good," concludes the record of 

 each day's work except the second, scholars have expended much fruitless labor 

 in their attempts to explain this omission ; but as it occurs twice in the records 

 of the third day, Patrick, Bush, and others, claim that verses nine and ten be- 

 long to the second day. This would make a more natural division of creative 

 work, — as others without regard to this expression of approval have suggested, 

 — and make the recorded approval of the Creator to conclude the work of each 

 day. If we accept this division, we must add to the changes on the second day 

 the concentration of the gaseous matter of the earth, first to the liquid form, then 



