"People had supposed, until about one hundred years ago, that the first chapter of Genesis was a fable, or fairy tale, but now geology proves it to have been a true history of what the writer knew nothing about. "It must have been that an angel who had lived all through the time the world was being made, sat right beside or in some way influenced the author to write the wonderful story of the creation. This is what I call real inspiration, don't you? "Some folks think, and I would not wonder if it might be true, that fiction is a faint glimmer of inspiration, and that composers are often led along by the spirit of some person who once lived in this world. Let this be as it may, I wish one of you children might become a novelist, but you never will, you will be farmers just like all us New England mountaineers. "Learned men have discovered, by digging in the rocky surface of the earth, that under certain conditions, oysters or other animals, will turn to stone. They call them fossils. Scientists have also learned that each kind, wherever found, represents the age in which the animal lived. So, the fossil, you see, is an animal which died and turned to stone, perhaps millions of years ago. "By investigation they find that one kind of rock, called azoic, contains no fossils, so they know there was a day or age when there was no life in this world, and this is the first day in the Bible, which I have been reading to you. FIRST DAY "They find by the conglomerate condition of the azoic rock that after the gaseous confusion of the elements had subsided, it sort of settled into one boiling mass of mixed elements. Then the heavier elements, gold, mercury, lead and the like, condensed and formed a center of attraction, while the more rare elements, such as oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, formed a floating band around it, then, as the Bible states, darkness must have been upon the face of the deep until the lighter elements rarefied, when the sun would feebly penetrate in the daytime and the rotation of the world would make it correspond to the first day and night of the Bible. SECOND DAY "This day, in which the firmament was formed, is wonderful in that it was preparation for the day when the land should appear, as it would need rain to make the vegetation grow. Man's highest imagination cannot grasp or conceive the wonders of this strange scheme. It really meant condensing part of the water to become liquid, or seas, and raising part to become clouds, or rain, as we now find them. So again the two accounts agree as to the second day. THIRD DAY "Seas and land appear. This Bible account exactly agrees with the carboniferous and crustacean births which followed on through the ages, when vegetation grew in such abundance that its decay, when submerged by eruptions, laid the foundations for our coal and oil fields. FOURTH DAY