The first chapter of Genesis is but a brief summary of an inconceivably vast series of events. It is nothing more than a rapid sketch, exhibiting, as it were, to the eye the prominent features in the history of Creation. Moreover, we should remember that it was written with a specific end in view. The purpose of the Sacred Writer was plainly to impress upon the Hebrew people, naturally prone to idolatry, the existence of One Supreme Being, who has made all things. Hence we should naturally expect that, amid the boundless variety of God’s works, he would make choice of those that were most calculated to strike the mind with wonder and awe, and to bring home to a rude and uncultivated race of men the Almighty Power and Supreme Dominion of the Great Creator. Now the Zoophytes, and Graptolites, and Trilobites, of the Devonian and Silurian Periods, however curious and interesting they may be to men of science, would have had but little significance for the Jewish people. Let us suppose that these more humble forms of animal life had, in fact, existed during the First and Second Days of the Mosaic narrative, and where is the wonder that the Inspired Historian, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, should pass them by in silence, and choose rather to commemorate the more striking and impressive facts, that, at the bidding of God, Light shone forth from the midst of darkness, and the blue firmament of Heaven was expanded above the waste of waters? We say, then, that events which are simply left unrecorded by the Sacred Writer are not, on that account, untrue:[176] that he describes to us, not all the works of Creation, which would have been an endless task, but only the more conspicuous objects in each successive stage; and that he sketches them, most probably, as they would have appeared to the eye of a human observer, if a human observer at the time had existed on the Earth. If this view be admitted, then it is not inconsistent with the Scripture narrative to suppose that plants may have existed before the Third Day, and fish before the Fifth. Each Day in its turn would have been rendered conspicuous to an observing spectator by those events which are recorded by Moses. But each Day, too, would have witnessed many other events, unnoticed by Moses, of which the memorials have been preserved, even to our time, in the Crust of the Earth.