Hence we read in chapter iii, verse 21:
"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothed them."
This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly, the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis,[2] only "thorns and thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just as in Job we are told:
Chap. xxx, verse 3. "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary."
[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 65.
2. Chap. iii, verse 18.]
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Verse 4. "Who cut up mallows by the bushes and juniper-roots for their food."
Verse 7. "Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles were they gathered together."
And God "drove out the man" from the fair Edenic world into the post-glacial desolation; and Paradise was lost, and--