h for
it, and its production along with a group of plants and animals suited
to it. These are precisely the conditions implied in the Scriptural
account of the creation of Adam.[99] The difficulties of the subject
have arisen from supposing, contrary to the narrative itself, that the
conditions necessary for Eden must in the first instance have extended
over the whole earth, and that the creatures with which man is in his
present dispersion brought into contact must necessarily have been his
companions there. One would think that many persons derive their idea
of the first man in Eden from nursery picture-books; for the Bible
gives no countenance to the idea that all the animals in the world
were in Eden. On the contrary, it asserts that a selection was made
both in the case of animals and plants, and that this Edenic
assemblage of creatures constituted man's associates in his state of
primeval innocence.

The food of animals is specified at the close of the work of this day.
The grant to man is every herb bearing seed, and every fruit-tree.
That to the lower animals is more extensive--every green herb. This
can not mean that every animal in the earth was herbivorous. It may
refer to the group of animals associated with man in Eden, and this is
most likely the intention of the writer; but if it includes the
animals of the whole earth, we may be certain, from the express
mention of carnivorous creatures in the work of the fifth and sixth
days, that it indicates merely the general fact that the support of
the whole animal kingdom is based on vegetation.

A most important circumstance in connection with the work of the sixth
day is that it witnessed the creation both of man and the mammalia. A
fictitious writer would probably have exalted man by assigning to him
a separate day, and by placing the whole animal kingdom together in
respect to time. He would be all the more likely to do this, if
unacquainted, as most ignorant persons as well as literary men are,
with the importance and teeming multitudes of the lower tribes of
animals, and with the typical identity of the human frame with that of
the higher animals. Moses has not done so, we are at liberty to
suppose, because the vision of creation had it otherwise; and modern
geology has amply vindicated him in this by its disclosure of the
intimate connection of the human with the tertiary period; and has
shown in this as in other instances that truth and not "accommodatio