While the Bible account of the creation gives sufficient margin to allow all the time claimed by the geologists for that work, let their claims be ever so extravagant, still let geologists have some modesty about them and admit--as perforce they must--that they do not know that the same conditions existed, or the same forces operated in those long ages of the past that now exist and operate. Hence it is not unlikely that changes resulting in the advancement of the earth's formation, and in its preparation for the abode of man were much more rapid then than now. This is not begging the question, there is no need of that; but it is mentioned in passing, as pointing to a condition of things not unlikely to have existed. III. What is most perplexing about the Bible narrative of this work of creation is that two accounts are given of it; and apparently there is an irreconcilable difference between them. In the first chapter of Genesis is a statement of the creation in respect to this earth and the heavens connected with it, from the time it was without form and void until it was a fit dwelling place for man: or, to put it in other words, the account seems to reach from highly attenuated nebulae to the solid earth clothed with its wealth of vegetable and animal life, with man placed upon it as the crowning excellence of the Creator's work. But after this elaborate account of the creation contained in the first chapter of Genesis, we are startled to read in the second chapter-- "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, _and there was not a man to till the ground_." One naturally pauses here to ask, what had become of the grasses, herbs, and trees spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis? what of the fishes of the sea, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field? what of man, male and female, of whose creation we have just read? and of the commandment to multiply and replenish the earth? Is it not strange that after reading of the creation of man in the first chapter that we should be told in the second that there was not a man to till the ground? Proceeding with this second account of creation the Bible says: