ified or bedded masses, more or less
inclined, fissured and irregularly elevated, and usually supported by
crystalline rocks which have been produced among them, or forced up
beneath or through them by internal agencies, and which truly
constitute the pillars and foundations of the earth. These elevations,
it is true, were successive, and belong to different periods; but the
appearance of the first dry land is that intended here.

The elevation of the dry land is more frequently referred to in
Scripture than any other cosmological fact; and while all have been
misapprehended, the statements on this subject have been even more
unjustly dealt with than others. In the text, the word "earth"
(_aretz_[78]) is, by divine sanction, narrowed in meaning to the dry
land; but while some expositors are quite willing to restrict it to
this, or even a more limited sense, in the first and second verses of
this chapter, almost the only verses in the Bible where the terms of
the narrative make such a restriction inadmissible, they are equally
ready to understand it as meaning the whole globe in places where the
explanatory clause in the verse now under consideration teaches us
that we should understand the land only, as distinguished from the
sea. I may quote some of these passages, and note the views they give;
always bearing in mind that, after the intimation here given, we must
understand the term "earth" as applying _only to the continents_ or
_dry land_, unless where the context otherwise fixes the meaning. We
may first turn to Psalm civ.:

"Thou laidst the foundations of the earth,
That it should never be removed;
Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment;
The waters stood above the mountains;
At thy rebuke they fled;
At the sound of thy thunder they hasted away;
Mountains ascended, valleys descended
To the place thou hast appointed for them:
Thou hast appointed them bounds that they may not pass,
That they return not again to cover the earth."

The position of these verses in this "the hymn of creation" leaves no
doubt that they refer to the events we are now considering. I have
given above the literal reading of the line that refers to the
elevation of mountains and subsidence of valleys; admitting, however,
that the grammatical construction gives an air of probability to the
rendering in our version, "they go up by the mountains, they go down
by the valleys," which, on the other hand, is render