sect eschewing meat, a tradition drawn from South Asia, whence the fathers of the Hebrew race came.5 Gesenius says, "Many things in this narrative were drawn from older Asiatic tradition." 6 Knobel also affirms that numerous matters in this relation were derived from traditions of East Asian nations.7 Still, it is not necessary to suppose that the writer of the account in Genesis borrowed any thing from abroad. The Hebrew may as well have originated such ideas as anybody else. The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chaldeans, the Persians, the Etruscans, have kindred narratives held as most ancient and sacred.8 The Chinese, the Sandwich Islanders, the North American Indians, also have their legends of the origin and altered fortunes of the human race. The resemblances between many of these stories are better accounted for by the intrinsic similarities of the subject, of the mind, of nature, and of mental action, than by the supposition of derivation from one another. Regarding the Hebrew narrative as an indigenous growth, then, how shall we explain its origin, purport, and authority? Of course we cannot receive it as a miraculous revelation conveying infallible truth. The Bible, it is now acknowledged, was not given in the providence 3 Tuch, Kommentar uber Genesis, s. xcviii. 4 Zur altesten Sagenpoesie des Orients. Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, band viii. ss. 772-779. 5 Mythologus, (Schopfung and Sundenfall, ) band i. s. 137. 6 Article "Adam," in Encyclopadia by Ersch and Gruber. 7 Die Genesis erklart, s. 28. 8 Palfrey's Academical Lectures, vol. ii. pp. 21-28.