chapters which, in their bearing upon science, are of more
importance than other portions of the Pentateuch), have been obviously
compiled from short, fragmentary legends of various authorship. To the
critical eye they all, however, present peculiarities which demonstrate
that they were written on the banks of the Euphrates, and not in the
Desert of Arabia. They contain many Chaldaisms. An Egyptian would not
speak of the Mediterranean Sea as being west of him, an Assyrian would.
Their scenery and machinery, if such expressions may with propriety be
used, are altogether Assyrian, not Egyptian. They were such records as
one might expect to meet with in the cuneiform impressions of the
tile libraries of the Mesopotamian kings. It is affirmed that one such
legend, that of the Deluge, has already been exhumed, and it is not
beyond the bounds of probability that the remainder may in like manner
be obtained.

From such Assyrian sources, the legends of the creation of the earth and
heaven, the garden of Eden, the making of man from clay, and of woman
from one of his ribs, the temptation by the serpent, the naming of
animals, the cherubim and flaming sword, the Deluge and the ark, the
drying up of the waters by the wind, the building of the Tower of
Babel, and the confusion of tongues, were obtained by Ezra. He commences
abruptly the proper history of the Jews in the eleventh chapter. At that
point his universal history ceases; he occupies himself with the story
of one family, the descendants of Shem.

It is of this restriction that the Duke of Argyll, in his book on
"Primeval Man," very graphically says:

In the genealogy of the family of Shem we have a list of names which are
names, and nothing more to us. It is a genealogy which neither does, nor
pretends to do, more than to trace the order of succession among a few
families only, out of the millions then already existing in the world.
Nothing but this order of succession is given, nor is it at all certain
that this order is consecutive or complete. Nothing is told us of all
that lay behind that curtain of thick darkness, in front of which
these names are made to pass; and yet there are, as it were, momentary
liftings, through which we have glimpses of great movements which were
going on, and had been long going on beyond. No shapes are distinctly
seen. Even the direction of those movements can only be guessed. But
voices are heard which are "as the voices of many waters."