3. With such a pole-pointing, only one end of the Earth could receive deposits, and the sun could take hold only of that end. Job alludes to a convulsion in which “The proud were shaken out of it, that the sun might take hold of both ends of it.” 38:13. Before this change, “The waters were covered as with a stone, and the deep was frozen.” Deposits are now made from the air at the rate of four hundredths of an inch in a year. At this rate it would take, possibly, eighty million of years to reach the surface. Our globe was never a rain-less planet.
4. The allusion to its not having rained on the earth, is an allusion that the deposits were yet beneath the waters, until the “dry land appeared.” Following the changes of organic life up to the time of the deposits of the “Old Red Sand Stone,” where God spread out the waving forests of the Devonian plain, he had found the fit contrast to the inorganic deposit of the evening.
5. The climate of the first part of the third clay was chilled to the temperature of melting ice. The latter part was torrid. The equator marked the bound between perpetual sunlight and perpetual darkness. Along this equator a line of open sea would beat against a line of perpetual ice. The spray and vapor from the open sea, going south, would be rapidly converted into snow and ice, increasing the thickness and gravity of the ice. At length, breaking by its own weight, it would drift into the open sea. During the first part of this day, there was nothing to prevent this drift-ice finding its way to the very north pole. The sea, therefore, would be at a temperature of 32 degrees Fahr.
6. After the deposits neared the top, and before dry land appeared, the larger bergs were kept back, and tropical waters resulted, followed by the same climate upon the dry land, as it appeared. At the close of this day there existed many kinds of water animals, but they did not form a suitable contrast with what Moses had to start with, as evening. These were inorganic deposits from the air. The organic deposits of the Devonian forests are the morning. “And the earth brought forth the tree, yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself (cryptogams) after his kind.” “And the evening and the morning were the third day.”
Section 4.
The Work of the Fourth Day.
Up to the Carboniferous time of deposit, the air had never been sufficiently cleared of its dark clouds of deadly gases, to admit sunshine on the earth. Vegetation had not reached a climax. No mention is to be made of animals existing, until this climax is reached. It will be reached when the sun shall have taken off the “swaddling band” of her childhood, and depositing the same, as coal, in the earth, shall give the earth a clothing of flowers. Non-flowering plants are evening, the contrast will be the flowering plant in the sunshine.
1. By figure of metonymy, again he traced the progress of deposits through the sun, which God had made, with the moon and stars. The labor of the sun to clear the atmosphere, calling for immediate help of God, was long and persevering. Poetically, the narrative is enriched by this elegant figure, in putting cause for effect. As now from the earth for the first time he beholds the clear sunlight, he doubtless is reminded, that in mentioning the creation of this center of attraction in our system, he had given a name which indicated a specific property of the sun, viz, light; whereas it also had heat and force.
Now, calling it by a generic name, and remembering also that in describing the origin of Earth no mention had been made of the rest of the heavens, he incidentally mentions that God made them all, without attempting the individual history of either. His mission is to trace in progress the contrasting changes of God’s work in the Earth. And to his text he adheres.
Since the sun is the only source of permanent natural light within our system, and since Moses had made light to contrast with the darkness of chaos in the first day, it seems strange that any intelligent reader should understand him to speak of the bringing into existence of the great orb of light the fourth day. Shining in on the earth is all that is noted.
2. Sir Charles Lyell, the great English geologist, gives us the process by which sunlight was let in on the earth during the carboniferous age. This age corresponds to the fourth day of Moses. The dark band of gases intercepted the clear rays of sunlight, so that a somber hue of gray covered the earth, as in twilight. Vegetation must slowly do the work of depositing these gases, until diminished so that fire, or flame, could be supported. Such was the resinous and oily nature of all vegetation of that period, that a stroke of lightning might set the world on fire, to burn for six months or a year. Some of the carbonated growth of the forests would be hidden away beyond the reach of flame. In this condition it would ripen into coal. But enough carbonic acid would escape, to intercept the clear rays of the sun, and another period of deposit would set in. In the Nova Scotia coal mines, alone, he had noticed one hundred of these burnings, implying a long period of deposit between each. It is thus the long ages struggled, to enable the sun to kiss the vegetation into bloom. The widely scattered coal beds of this period show that the whole earth was covered with a tropical forest. Large veins of this coal are found in Greenland, Nova Zembla Island, Tasmania, and the Melville Islands.