"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make _coats of skins and clothed them_." This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly, the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis,[2] only "thorns and thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just as in Job we are told: Chap. xxx, verse 3. "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary." [1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 65. 2. Chap. iii, verse 18.] {p. 326} Verse 4. "Who cut up mallows by the bushes and juniper-roots for their food." Verse 7. "Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles were they gathered together." And God "_drove out the man_" from the fair Edenic world into the post-glacial desolation; and Paradise was lost, and-- "At the east of the garden of Eden he placed cherubims and _a flaming sword_, which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life." This is the sword of the comet. The Norse legends say: "Yet, before all things, there existed what we call Muspelheim. It is a world luminous, glowing, not to be dwelt in by strangers, and situate at the end of the earth. Surtur holds his empire there. _In his hand there shines a flaming sword_." There was a great conflagration between the by-gone Eden and the present land of stones and thistles. Is there any other allusion besides this to the fire which accompanied the comet in Genesis? Yes, but it is strangely out of place. It is a distinct description of the pre-glacial wickedness of the world, the fire falling from heaven, the cave-life, and the wide-spread destruction of humanity; but the compiler of these antique legends has located it in a time long subsequent to the Deluge of Noah, and in the midst of a densely populated world. It is as if one were to represent the Noachic Deluge as having occurred in the time of Nero, in a single province of the Roman Empire, while the great world went on its course unchanged by the catastrophe which must, if the statement were true, have completely overwhelmed it. So we find the story of Lot and the destruction of the cities of the plain brought down to the time {p. 327}