Many writers seem to suppose that the evening and the morning are intended by Moses to designate the night and the day;--that is to say, the whole period of darkness and the whole period of light, which put together make up the civil day of twenty-four hours. If the text could be explained in this way, it would fit in, no doubt, much more appropriately with the theory of ordinary days than with the theory of indefinite periods. But the text _cannot_ be explained in this way. The evening is _not_ the whole period of darkness, and the morning is _not_ the whole period of light. No English writer could say, with propriety, that the Day is made up of the evening and the morning. Neither could Moses have meant to say this in the first chapter of Genesis: for the Hebrew words ערב (_Ghereb_) _and_ בקר (_Boker_) which are found in the original text, have a meaning not less fixed and definite than the corresponding words Evening and the Morning in the English language. To prove the truth of this assertion by an investigation of all the passages in the Hebrew Bible, in which these words are found, would be a tedious and uninteresting task. But it may be easily tested in another way. If the words ערב (_Ghereb_) and בקר (_Boker_) were ever used to mean, not strictly the evening and morning, but the whole period of night and the whole period of day, this fact would surely have become known in the course of time to some of the many eminent and accomplished Hebrew lexicographers. We ask, then, is there one Hebrew lexicon of note which assigns the sense of _night_ to the word ערב (_Ghereb_) and the sense of _day_ to the word בקר (_Boker_). For ourselves, we have searched several of the best of them, and we have not found a single one that even hints at such an explanation. Perhaps, however, some of our readers might be unwilling to accept the authority of lexicons as conclusive on a point of this kind; seeing that lexicons very often represent but imperfectly the full power of a language. Well, then, there is another process, and a simple one enough, by which they may demonstrate the inaccuracy of our statement, if inaccurate it be. Let them produce any passage from the Hebrew Bible in which the words ערב (_Ghereb_) and בקר (_Boker_) are employed to designate the whole night and the whole day. If they fail to do so,--and as far as we are aware, no such passage has yet been discovered,--then surely we may fairly contend that the interpretation which thus explains the words in the first chapter of Genesis cannot be regarded as certain: nor can the argument founded on that interpretation be received as conclusive.