Dr. Pye Smith, accepting the immense undefined interval between the event of the first verse, and the condition chronicled in the second, held the somewhat remarkable opinion that the term "earth" in that verse, and throughout the whole description of the six days, is "designed to express the part of our world which God was adapting for the dwelling of man and the animals connected with him." And that portion he conceived to have been "a part of Asia, lying between the Caucasian ridge, the Caspian Sea, and Tartary on the north, the Persian and Indian Seas on the south, and the high mountain ridges which run at considerable distances on the eastern and western flank." The whole of the six days' creation was confined, on this hypothesis, to the re-stocking, with plants and animals, of this limited region after an inundation caused by its subsidence. The flood of Noah was nothing more than a second overflowing of the same region, by "an elevation of the bed of the Persian and Indian Seas, or a subsidence of the inhabited land towards the south."[20] The author of "The Protoplast" has made the very original suggestion, that the geological periods may have occurred during the paradisaical condition of man, which he thinks was of an indefinitely protracted duration, human chronology commencing at the Fall. "We have no data in Scripture from which to gather certain information, and Adam may have lived unfallen _one day_, or _millions of years_." The years of the first man's mortal life began to be reckoned when his immortality ceased. He was nine hundred and thirty years _old_:[21] he had been nine hundred and thirty years gradually decaying, slowly dying. "It may, indeed, be said that no man could have survived those convulsions of nature, of which traces have been discovered in the earth's crust. I would reply to this;--First, that we have no reason to suppose that these changes affected the whole globe _at once_; they may have been _partial and successive_; and the world's Eden may have been a spot peculiarly exempted from their influence. Secondly, that Adam's body before the fall was not constituted as ours now are; it was incorruptible and immortal: physical phenomena could have had no deleterious effect upon him." "Why should we find any difficulty in supposing that the geological changes which appear to have passed upon the globe, _after_ its creation, and _before_ its curse, were to the first man sources of ever-renewing admiration, delight, and advantage? "Inclining to the belief that both the animal fell and the animal curse were considerably antecedent to the sin of Adam, I see no difficulty in the admission, that animal death may also have prevailed prior to that event."[22]