I dare not believe that what has been spoken will altogether meet the requirements of minds of a certain stamp. A gentleman, who certainly has the advantage of appearing in good company, has lately favoured the world with the information that the first chapter of Genesis is the uninspired speculation of a Hebrew astronomer, who was bent on giving "the best and most probable account that could be then given of GOD'S universe[302]." The Hebrew writer asserts indeed "solemnly and unhesitatingly that for which he must have known that he had no authority[303];" but we need not therefore "attribute to him wilful misrepresentation, or consciousness of asserting that which he knew not to be true[304]." If this "early speculator" "asserted as facts what he knew in reality only as probabilities," it was because he was not harassed by the scruples which result "from our modern habits of thought, and from the modesty of assertion which the spirit of true science has taught us[305]." The history of this important discovery and of others of a similar nature, (which, by the way, are one and all announced with the same "modesty of assertion" as what goes before,) would appear to be this.--Natural science has lately woke up from her long slumber of well nigh sixty ages; and with that immodesty for which youth and inexperience have ever been proverbial, she is impatient to measure her crude theories against the sure revelation of GOD'S Word. Where the two differ, she assumes that of course the inspired Oracles are wrong, and her own wild guesses right. She is even indecent in her eagerness to invalidate the testimony of that Book which has been the confidence and stay of GOD'S Servants in all ages. On any evidence, or on none, she is prepared to hurl to the winds the august record of Creation. Inconveniently enough for the enemies of GOD'S Word, every advance in Geological Science does but serve to corroborate the record that the Creation _of Man_ is not to be referred to a remoter period than some six thousand years ago. But of this important fact we hear but little. On the other hand, no trumpet is thought loud enough to bruit about _a suspicion_ that Man may be a creature of yet remoter date. Thus, fragments of burnt brick found fifty feet below the surface of the banks of the Nile, were hailed as establishing Man's existence in Egypt more than 13,000 years; until it was unhappily remembered that _burnt_ brick in Egypt belongs to the period of the Roman dominion.--More recently, implements of chipped flint found, with some bones, in a bed of gravel, have been eagerly appealed to as a sufficient indication that the Creation of Man is to be referred to a period at least 10,000 years more remote than is fixed by the Chronology of the Bible.... Brick and flint! a precious fulcrum, truly, for a theory which is to upset the World!