he primeval chaos becomes the type of evil as opposed to the order,
beauty, and goodness of the creation of God--a very natural
association; but one kept in the background by the Hebrew Scriptures,
as tending to a dualistic belief subversive of monotheism. The Greek
myth of Chaos, and its children Erebus and Night, who give birth to
Aether and Day, is the same tradition, personified after the fanciful
manner of a people who, in the primitive period of their civilization,
had no profound appreciation of nature, but were full of human
sympathies.[41] Lastly, in a hymn translated by Dr. Max Mueller from
the Rig-Veda, a work probably far older than the Institutes of Menu,
we have such utterances as the following:

"Nor aught nor nought existed: yon bright sky
Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above.
What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the water's fathomless abyss? * * *
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound--an ocean without light;
The germ that still lay covered in the husk
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat."

It is evident that the state of our planet which we have just been
considering is one of which we can scarcely form any adequate
conception, and science can in no way aid us, except by suggesting
hypotheses or conjectures. It is remarkable, however, that nearly all
the cosmological theories which have been devised contain some of the
elements of the inspired narrative. The words of Moses appear to
suggest a heated and cooling globe, its crust as yet unbroken by
internal forces, covered by a universal ocean, on which rested a mass
of confused vaporous substances; and it is of such materials, thus
combined by the sacred historian, that cosmologists have built up
their several theories, aqueous or igneous, of the early state of the
earth. Geology, as a science of observation and induction, does not
carry us back to this period. It must still and always say, with
Hutton, that it can find "no trace of a beginning, no prospect of an
end"--not because there has been no beginning or will be no end, but
because the facts which it collects extend neither to the one nor the
other. Geology, like every other department of natural history, can
but investigate the facts which are open to observation, and reason on
these in accordance with the known laws and arrangements of existing
nature. It finds these laws to hold for the oldest period t