Now as we have every reason to presume that our present period of activity is not the first of our solar system, we have reason to place a special meaning on the words _Berâsit brâ Elohim âth hashemâyim veâth heâretz_: In the beginning the Elohim compounded the original matter of the heavens and of the earth. Long periods of cosmic evolution elapsed, and at the point where the Great Breath again reached our planet we take up the thread of the Chaldean account _veheâretz tohu vebohu_: “and the earth was chaotic and barren.” The use of the prefix _vau_ as a copulative conjunction at the beginning of each separate statement, links up the various stages of the evolutional scheme without defining the vast ages, the “days” and “nights” of the cosmos, which intervene. From the great aqueous development we pass to the amphibians, the “creeping things,” the avians or “flying things and fowls of the air,” until by a process of natural evolution and natural selection, determined entirely by the individual power of adaptation to environment, we at length arrive at the evolution of the human-animal. The brief but perfectly scientific statement, “And God (the Elohim) made men out of the dust of the earth,” is a process which involves an indefinitely long period of evolution. But so far we have only the ascending arc of physical evolution, which in effect found its apotheosis in the production of giant human forms, fitted to the great struggle for existence with the saurians and pachyderms and all that mammoth life, both vegetable and animal, by which it was environed. “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Nature had done her utmost in the production of colossal forms of animal life, she had expended all her strength. It was at this point, where Nature unaided would have failed, and in process of time died down to her root, as a tree that has put forth leaf and flower and fruit, that the upward arc of _physical evolution_ was met by a downward arc of _spiritual involution_. The two processes are well defined: 1. God made man out of the dust of the earth. 2. And breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives.