IN THE CKEATION STOEY OF GENESIS. 



79 



a century or two old. Such omissions in no way vitiate 

 liis conception of Evolutionary Law causing an orderly 

 development of the universe, which is here presented to the 

 mind of primitive man in the mineral, vegetable, and animal 

 kingdoms, as the outcome of the action of beneficent mind and 

 will behind it all. 



This wonderful poem hath indeed its marvels, as we perceive 

 in it anticipations of some of the most recent conclusions of 

 science. Thus, if we allow for the " personal equation " in the 

 human author, there is a clear substratum of scientific truth 

 underlying the first three verses, such as would be expressed, if 

 we paraphrased them freely, thus : — 



The beginning of things was the coming-in to-being by the 

 Will of God of the matter of the universe, as we know it. 

 Such matter existed at first as a dark and formless waste 

 (E.V. V. 2). Energy resulting in motion came into play, as a 

 further result of the action of the Creative Spirit. As a 

 consequence a further advance was made in the generation of 

 heat and light, the matter becoming incandescent from its own 

 heat." 



The advance from the darkness of the formless (disintegrated 

 and ultra-gaseous) condition of the matter of the universe, 

 to the luminosity of the embryonic earth (by chemical com- 

 bination), strikes the mind of the author as so marked, that he 

 clothes the idea in a metaphor : " God said, Let there be light." 

 He recognises that this globe was at its inception self-luminous, 

 just as we see, with the aid of stellar photography, those 

 separate centres of the " spiral nebulte " to be, or to have been 

 at the time, when they emitted the light which reaches the 

 negative of the astronomer's camera. How did he get such an 

 idea? How did he, thousands of years ago, thus anticipate onej 

 of the latest revelations of science, which, deduced by some of ' 

 us* previously from the facts presented by geology and ' 

 thermal chemistry, is now brought with such powerful 

 conviction to our minds by telescopic photography ? 



The inception of the earth's barysphcre as a separate centre 

 of condensation in the rotating nebula was the prevailing idea 

 in the author's mind in his speculations some seventeen 

 years ago. In the present state of our knowledge, with new 

 light thrown upon the evolution even of the " atoms " of the 

 chemist, the explaucttion of such separate centres seems to come 



See A. Irving, Cliem. and Phys. Studies (1889). 



