fruit before partaking of it himself. For these good acts he deserved the use of his legs, which, we must presume, he lost by the fall, when he transgressed, fell, and was cursed; and a part of this curse consisted in taking his legs from him, and compelling him to crawl. But it appears his legs were afterwards restored to him; for, when he came with the sons of God to attend a picnic at the house of Job, and was asked where he came from, replied, "From walking to and fro in the earth." This feat of walking he could not very well have performed without legs. Hence we naturally conclude they had grown out again, or had been restored to him in some way, notwithstanding it had been decreed he should "crawl on his belly all the days of his life." The whole story of the serpent, as presented in Genesis, is a borrowed and laughable fiction; and the reader will excuse us for presenting it in that light. We have shown that the violation of the command of Jehovah to Adam and Eve not to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, so far from being attended with any evil result, gave rise to several important benefits, and was therefore a praiseworthy act. And if they had carried the act of disobedience a little further, and plucked and eaten of the fruit from the "tree of life" also, it would, according to the context, have produced results still more important, as it would have immortalized their physical bodies, and prevented the ingress of death into the world; and we should have been spared that dreadful calamity. But a worse calamity would have overtaken us; for it is easily seen, that, in the course of a few centuries, our planet would be overstocked with inhabitants. And, as a part of Adam's curse consisted in being doomed to eat the ground (see Gen. iii. 17), it follows, that, if none of his posterity had died, they would have become so numerous in the course of time as to have eaten up all the ground (there being nothing else for them to eat), and leave not a mole-hill of _terra firma_ for a living being to stand upon. The conception is really ludicrous, and yet a legitimate inference from the story which presents us with a series of laughable ideas from beginning to end.