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Dr. Thornton appears to take, that, when the author of a paper comes before' 
us and makes several mistakes, we should let him off easily, because we 
happen to agree with some of the general principles which he lays down. If 
we find him making a large number of mistakes in his paper, that tends to 
the presumption that there may be something wrong in his conclusions, and 
we ought therefore to examine the foundations all the more carefully before 
we commit ourselves to those conclusions. Dr. Baylee gives us a curious 
argument to prove that Hebrew is the primeval language. He tells us that 
the names of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, are all significant in Hebrew, 
and that they are not so even in the cognate languages. In order to test the 
validity of these derivations, assumed or stated, I turned up the highest 
authority I had access to — Fiirst’s Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon. I looked 
at the root which lies at the foundation of Eve, and I foimd it quite as 
significant in Persian, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Sanscrit. The root of 
Noah also was to be foimd in Sanscrit, in German, and in Arabic. I 
could not trace the root so well in the names of Adam and Abel, but 
I found sufficient to tell me that there is no evidence, from the 
peculiar significance of these names in Hebrew, that Hebrew was 
the language originally spoken. Then I find a very extraordinary de- 
rivation to which Dr. Baylee has committed himself. He tells us that 
Adam is derived from dama, to resemble, but any one who looks at the 
second chapter of Genesis will see at once that as God formed man out of the 
adamah, or ground, so he afterwards called his name Adam. It is plain that 
that was the derivation. In the Aryan tongues you get the same derivation 
for the name of man — in Latin, homo, a man, has the same root as humus , 
the ground. I pass over Dr. Baylee’s derivation of earth and deep, but a 
little further on I find him giving nephesh as meaning the bodily frame. 
Now, that word is never so used in the Scriptures. It means simply a 
breathing, and I cannot conceive how Dr. Baylee can have taken it to mean 
a bodily frame. Passing from that point, we come to Dr. Baylee’s criticism 
upon the word bar a, to create, and we are told that that word is only used as 
a sign of work in a complete state. It would have been worth Dr. Baylee’s 
while if he had turned to a passage in Isaiah, where the word “ create ” is 
used synonymously with “ make ” and “ fashion.” This is remarkable, because 
it upsets Dr. Baylee’s rule that in the Scriptures those things are said to be 
created which are perfected, and those things made and fashioned which are 
incomplete. Here we find, that God made the light and created the darkness : 
He made the good and created the evil. Would Dr. Baylee say that darkness 
and evil are complete states, and that light and good are imperfect ? Yet that 
is the result of his criticism on the word bara. Then he says that the word 
create is only used with regard to man and woman when both of them have 
been made, and so the work of their creation completed, the words “made” 
or “ formed ” being used in the separate creations of each of them. But if he 
had quoted the whole text instead of only half of it, he would have refuted him- 
self ; for the verse commences by saying, “ God created man in his own image,” 
the word being used in the singular before <c man ” alone, before it is put 
