In tracing back the duration of the globe, the first demand of the uninitiated will be for the written evidence of historical records. The popular impression claims to be founded upon such evidence of the most authoritative description. Little do the upholders of this impression in general understand that they are building their faith, not upon the Book of Genesis, or the inspiration of the Hebrew lawgiver, but on the arithmetical speculations of an Irish archbishop, who lived in the seventeenth century. Before we can accept the Hebrew genealogies as competent data for historical chronology, we must understand the principles on which they were framed. In ancient languages we have abundant evidence to show that the ties of blood were not as sharply distinguished as among ourselves. The same word sufficed to designate son and grandson, and even the most remote descendant. A man’s heir was called his son; an usurping successor might receive the same title[43]; and, beyond all this, it has been shown to have been ‘a common practice with the Jews to distribute genealogies into divisions, each containing some favourite or mystical number; and that, in order to do this, generations were either repeated or left out.’ Some persons, perhaps, will say, ‘We don’t believe it, or we don’t believe it in regard to any of the biblical genealogies.’ And yet the very first chapter of the New Testament is the most conclusive and incontrovertible proof of the statement; for our Lord’s genealogy[44] is there expressly divided into three periods of fourteen generations each, and the middle period has been stripped of three generations in order to bring it down to the pre-determined number. The names of three well-known princes (Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah), whose histories occupy several chapters in the Second Book of Kings, are omitted, and Amaziah’s son is described, without further note or comment, as a son begotten by one who was really his father’s great-grandfather. In a matter so obvious, there cannot attach to the compiler of the genealogy the very faintest suspicion of bad faith. He was following the custom of his country, for reasons then deemed, and perhaps in those days actually being, good and sufficient. Can we make as satisfactory an apology for men in the present day, who shut their eyes to the nature of the evidence on which they build opinions about the age of the world opposed to the discoveries of science? If in the first century of the Christian era, in times of comparative enlightenment, by men of approved truth and uprightness, genealogies could be compiled without the smallest regard being paid to the actual number of successive generations, it becomes impossible to attach any value as chronological evidence to Hebrew genealogies fifteen hundred, or, for all that we can tell, fifteen thousand years more ancient. Had the genealogy on which this conclusion rests admitted a chance of error, had there been any motive for fraud in its