Infidels frequently attempt to make sport of the figures of sacred poetry such as the "pillars," and "windows of heaven," the "corners of the earth," the "four winds of heaven," etc. One prominent infidel writer asserts that Moses was so ignorant of the nature of the atmosphere, and the origin of rain that he taught that the firmament was simply a brazen hemisphere or huge caldron placed in an inverted position over the earth, that a fresh-water ocean was outside of this, and that the figurative term "windows of heaven" meant trap-doors to let {164} the waters descend in the form of rain upon the inhabitants of the earth. If so, Moses did not put his teachings into practice; for we find that he set up a brazen hemisphere in the tabernacle and placed its mouth upwards and put water on the inside of it. Such are the miserable subterfuges to which infidels will resort when in want of an argument. They seem to forget that a thousand years before skeptics had learned to talk nonsense about crystal spheres, and trap-doors in the bottom of celestial oceans, the writers of the Bible were recording those conversations of pious philosophers concerning stars, clouds and rain, from which Galileo derived the first hints of the causes of barometrical phenomena. The origin of rain, its proportion to the amount of evaporation, and the mode of its distribution by condensation, could not be propounded by Humboldt himself with greater clearness than they are described by Job, the ancient philosopher of the land of Uz. "He maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain according to the vapor thereof, which the clouds do draw and distil upon man abundantly" (_Job xxxvi_. 27). The cause of this rarefaction of cold water, is as much a mystery to modern scientific associations as it was to Job and Elihu; and even were all the electrical tension of vapors disclosed, "the balancing of the clouds" would only be more clearly discovered to be, as the Bible declares, "the wonderful works of Him, who is perfect in knowledge." Three thousand years before the theory of the trade winds was {165} demonstrated by Maury, it was written in the Bible, "The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north," and, "The wind returneth again according to his circuits" (_Eccl. i_, 6). Thousands of years before Newton, Galileo and Copernicus were born, Isaiah was writing about the orbit of the earth and the earth's relative insignificance (_Isaiah xl_, 22). Even the modern names of some of the constellations of the heavens were known to the ancients. "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" (_Job xxxviii_, 31).