**April-fools are no doubt of vast antiquity; but Jeroboam is perhaps the first we met with in the Bible. This reproach was incurred by those who, like him, persisted in calf adoration, after its archetype the Bull, or sign Taurus, had ceased to be the "House of the Sun," at the-vernal equinox; that is, after the Bull of April had given place to the Ram, or Lamb of March; and, according to the Rev. Mr. Maurice, that point could not have coincided with the first degree of Aries, later than 1800 years before our era. Wherever such digressions as the above are made in the course of these Lectures, they are intended to show that, although we treat the Bible according to its literal meaning, the respect we have for it, _so far as it is a book of hidden science_, induces us to give such explanations, as they alone do it justice according to knowledge. But since its priests and their ignorant dupes insist on adopting the outward, or sense nonsensical, the best way to expose their folly is to take them at their word.. The legend about the first man may have been taken from Apollodorus' fable of Prometheus, who made the first man and woman with clay, and afterwards animated them with fire which he had stolen from the chariot of the sun; or was the first creation in Genesis imitated from Plato's story of the androgynæ, or double _homo_, possessing both sexes? Such was the hermaphrodite, or first creation in Genesis; the second was purely masculine, and only one of his ribs turned into the feminine. In the ancient Persian traditions, there were two distinct fables about the creation of man, from which those in Genesis appear to have been taken: but the compiler of that book, knowing both of the stories, and being at a loss which to prefer, has foolishly mingled them together, yet still preserving the two creations. Thus it seems pretty certain that the Jewish fable about the first man and woman is of Persian origin. Henry Lord, in a book written at Surat, on the cosmogonies of India and Persia, and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, says: "In the Persian cosmogony, the name of the first man was _Adamoh_ and of the woman _Hevah_. From hence come the Adam and Eve of the book of Genesis. Hevah is the name given to the woman, in an English edition of the Bible, printed in 1583."