Of verses 10 to 14 Voltaire speaks as follows:--'According to this version, the earthly paradise would have contained nearly a third part of Asia and of Africa. The sources of the Euphrates and the Tigris are sixty leagues distant from each other, in frightful mountains bearing no possible resemblance to a garden. The river which borders Ethiopia, and which can be no other than the Nile, commences its course at the distance of more than a thousand leagues from the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; and if the Pison means the Phasis, it is not a little surprising that the source of a Scythian river and that of an African one should be situated on the same spot. We must therefore look for some other explanation, and for other rivers. Every commentator has got up a Paradise of his own.' Dr. John Pye Smith suggests that the description is antediluvian, and that the deluge changed the courses of many streams; that hence we must not expect to find any spot conforming to the exact geographical description. If antediluvian, Moses did not write it. 'Verse 15. "The Lord then took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden that he might cultivate it." Voltaire continues:-- 'It is very respectable and pleasant for a man to "cultivate his garden," but it must have been somewhat difficult for Adam to have dressed and kept in order a garden of a thousand leagues in length, even although he had been supplied with some assistants. {17} Commentators on this subject, therefore, we again observe, are completely at a loss, and must be content to exercise their ingenuity in conjecture. Accordingly, these four rivers have been described as flowing through numberless different territories.' Verses 16 and 17. It is a matter of great difficulty to refrain from ridiculing the statement that there exist trees bearing such fruit, and after overcoming this difficulty, it is still less comprehensible why God should forbid man to acquire a knowledge of good and evil. Would not man's free access to this knowledge appear more in accordance with the character of a just and merciful God? and is not knowledge necessary to man, especially when we find the serpent 'more subtle than other animals,' plotting man's destruction? Verses 18 and 19. It is somewhat remarkable that immediately after the Lord God had declared his intention of making a helpmeet