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The same fault is manifested in the author's frequent allusions to a cooling globe as auxiliary to his theory. For example, we read (p. 84):

"If the earth from its earliest consolidation has been steadily cooling, it is hardly possible to conceive of a method by which any region once too hot for human residence can have become at length too cold except by passing through all the intermediate changes of temperature, some of which must have been precisely adapted to human comfort."

Again (p. 59): "The first portions of the earth's surface sufficiently cool to present the conditions of Eden life were assuredly at the poles."

Were our author aware of the immense lapse of time demanded for this cooling process he certainly would not have tried to lay it under contribution. It is totally impossible to obtain any help from this source. The extraordinary miocene summer, whatever its cause may have been, was not due in

Quaternary-Includes the Ice Age or Ages and all subsequent events.

Pliocene-During this era the climate of the north hemisphere grew on the whole cooler, and the miocene mammalian fauna became extinct.

Miocene-At this time occurred the warm climate of the north hemisphere, to which our author so frequently

refers, when the north frigid zone was clad in verdure perhaps even to the pole.

Eocene-This first part of the tertiary was of enormous length. Limestones 8000 ft. thick were formed. Since the end of the eocene most of the great mountain ranges have been formed,-the Alps, Himalayas, Carpathians, Rocky Mountains, Andes,

etc.

Cretaceous-First dicotyledonous plants.
Jurassic-First birds.

Triassic-First mammals.

Carboniferous-Most of the great coal-beds formed. First reptiles and monocotyledonous plants.

Devonian-Age of great armour-clad fish.

Silurian-First vertebrates (fish?). First certain land-plants (cryptogams).

Cambro silurian-Invertebrate animals only; seaweeds.
Cambrian-First certain traces of life.]

any degree to the internal heat of the earth. Be the crust at present thin or thick it cannot be very different from what it was then, and the influence of the internal heat upon the surface is now infinitesimally small, indeed quite inappreciable save by very refined methods of observation.4

We must further remind Dr. Warren that in thus implicitly stating that the advent of man was an immediate result of the cooling of the earth to a temperature compatible with his existence, he is ignoring all the long geological ages through which animal life existed, but during which "there was no man."

It is, moreover, quite contrary to all the evidence from geology to suppose that this cooling process has been regular and continuous. Evidence is coming to light which leads some to believe that there have been many ice ages in the past even as far back as the Carboniferous age, if not earlier. On this point the opinion of so conservative and I may almost say so anti-glacial a geologist as Sir William Dawson of Montreal, is worth much. In his address as President of the British Association, at Birmingham, in September last, he said:

"We have in America ancient periods of cold. I have referred to the boulder conglomerates of the Cambrian, the Siluro-cambrian and the Carboniferous, but would not venture to affirm that either of these periods was comparable in its cold with the later Glacial age." (See table in footnote 3.)

Apart from the immense lapse of time above mentioned, this alternate cooling and warming of the earth's surface if established, would destroy the value of all arguments to prove the occurrence of an Edenic climate as a consequence of slow secular refrigeration.

One word more. Dr. Warren has referred the cradle of the human race to the North Polar Regions and the Miocene Summer. "Man in the Miocene" has been a favorite speculation with some geologists, but as yet we have not a single speci

4 We may remark here that the quotations (p. 85) from various geologists, do not justify any inference that the writers advocated the opinion here opposed. Indeed, we are confident that their authors would emphatically reject it.

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men to which we can point and say, "There is a relic of Miocene Man.' It is unfortunate that we cannot yet estimate in years the distance of the Miocene age. But it is nevertheless certain that in thus relegating man to so distant a date, Dr. Warren is granting more than the most sanguine advocates of human antiquity have ever expected. It must be counted at the lowest estimate by hundreds of thousands of years. Moreover our earliest traces of man in days much later than the Miocene, are those of a low, bestial savage hardly above the brute, his companion; a being scarcely able to use chipped flints, and acquainted with no other weapon. For him it seems scarcely necessary to devise an Elen such as Genesis describes and Dr. Warren imagines. He would be happier outside than inside its pale.

IV.

As our author nowhere commits himself to the support of certain current theological doctrines regarding primeval innocence, perfection and happiness, and subsequent fall and degeneration, it would be unfair to assume that he intends to include any such dogmas in his idea of Eden. We consequently avoid all reference to these points and confine our remarks to what is found in the book itself.

If, however, as some passages almost compel us to believe, the work is intended to bolster up the cosmogony of the Hebrew Scriptures it is, like most of its predecessors, a complete failure. It is utterly impossible to reconcile the ad.nission here made of man's great antiquity and his survival through more than one complete faa with any, fais interpretation of the story of Genesis,. But above and beyond these difficulties, which we have already noticed, our author makes an attempt to force the Ice Age,into, service to do duty for the Deluge. He says (p. 47):

"The cradle of the human race was situated at the North Pole, in a country submerged at the time of the Deluge." Again (p. 421): "The new physical conditions under which the race was placed, were the conditions brought in by the 5 It may be further urged that all supposed traces of Miocene man have occurred not in the polar regions but in Europe.

NEW SERIES. VOL. XXIII.

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Diluvial Cataclysm. They involved (1) expatriation, the Great Glacial Age compelling an entire abandonment of the mother-country; (2) dispersion; (3) deterioration; and (4) abbreviation of previous longevity."

He supposes that the Miocene Arctic lands, where he has placed the cradle of humanity, have been submerged, and that the Arctic Islands are merely its mountain tops remaining above water. This submersion he seems disposed at one time to attribute to terrestrial polar subsidence, (after Leibnitz, Deluc, etc.), and at another to the attraction of accumulated ice (after Adhemar, Croll, etc.) But either is totally inconsistent with the story in the Jewish cosmogony. Whatever its duration may have been we are sure that the interval between the Miocene Age and the Glacial Era was vastly longer than that which has passed since the disappearance of the ice. If, then, as Dr. Warren supposed, man remained in the Garden of Eden until driven out by the oncoming of the cold, he must have spent the greatest part of his specific life in paradise, and his exclusion there from is an event as it were of yesterday. We need not stay to point out the strong discord latent here between the theory of our author and the story in Genesis. We confess also that the interpretation which finds in a massive polar ice-sheet the flaming sword that kept the way of the Tree of Life, appears to us to border on the vagaries of dreamland (p. 432.)

Nor is our author more successful than others were before him in his attempt to explain away the mention of the Euphrates in the descript of Eden in Genesis. This has been a stumbling stone in the way of writers of his school ever since the days of Granville Penn, whose labored efforts to set aside the objection, will be remembered by all who have read his "Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies." (See p. 27). If a writer living in the East employed the term "Euphrates" (Phrath) without meaning the great river of that name, then all attempts to extract geographical science from his description are no better than waste of time. And in regard to such attempts we may suggest that it is

surely more respectful to the books and to their authors, to maintain that they told what they thought was truth even though they were mistaken, than to twist and torture their language (after the fashion of some lawyers) until it means anything or nothing at the will of conflicting commentators. Such verbal criticism" as it is called, really such verbal catchplay, moves the "profane " to laughter and scepticism. It recalls forcibly the famous

"Aio te, Aeacide, Romanos vincere posse,"

and other similar" oracular" utterances.

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Far be it from us to discourage any- even the most unpromising or trivial-real investigation into ancient history or ancient grammar; far be it from us to make light of definite results, be they ever so small; but equally far be the so-called criticism which, by continued torture, hypocritical suggestion, and unwarranted interpretation, extorts any desired confession from these long-suffering Hebrew writers. To believe the farfetched and often contradictory versions of the commentators, is often to lose all respect for the grand old men who wrote the original texts. But to admit that they erred through imperfec: knowledge, is simply to admit that they were men, and to leave their manhood uninsulted, and their integrity unsullied.

V.

But returning from this digression we have one more indictment. It has been common with "reconciliationist" writers, while condemning doctrines held and taught by scientific men as resting merely on hypotheses, to build up theories of their own on assumed bases of proportions so magnificent that they stagger the reader by their very magnitude and prevent instant challenge. We cannot acquit our author on this count, but one or two charges must suffice. He speaks (pp. 100,101, 102, et al.) in a sarcastic tone of the theory of man's development from some lower, perhaps apish ancestor, and calls it "irrational." But without saying a word here on the theory, and no cautious biologist will claim for it any higher name, we may remind him that whatever assumption of intermediate links it implies, there are assumptions at least equally

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