The elevation of the dry land is more frequently referred to in Scripture than any other cosmological fact; and while all have been misapprehended, the statements on this subject have been even more unjustly dealt with than others. In the text, the word "earth" (_aretz_[78]) is, by divine sanction, narrowed in meaning to the dry land; but while some expositors are quite willing to restrict it to this, or even a more limited sense, in the first and second verses of this chapter, almost the only verses in the Bible where the terms of the narrative make such a restriction inadmissible, they are equally ready to understand it as meaning the whole globe in places where the explanatory clause in the verse now under consideration teaches us that we should understand the land only, as distinguished from the sea. I may quote some of these passages, and note the views they give; always bearing in mind that, after the intimation here given, we must understand the term "earth" as applying _only to the continents_ or _dry land_, unless where the context otherwise fixes the meaning. We may first turn to Psalm civ.: "Thou laidst the foundations of the earth, That it should never be removed; Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment; The waters stood above the mountains; At thy rebuke they fled; At the sound of thy thunder they hasted away; Mountains ascended, valleys descended To the place thou hast appointed for them: Thou hast appointed them bounds that they may not pass, That they return not again to cover the earth." The position of these verses in this "the hymn of creation" leaves no doubt that they refer to the events we are now considering. I have given above the literal reading of the line that refers to the elevation of mountains and subsidence of valleys; admitting, however, that the grammatical construction gives an air of probability to the rendering in our version, "they go up by the mountains, they go down by the valleys," which, on the other hand, is rendered very improbable by the sense. In whichever sense we understand this line, the picture presented to us by the Psalmist includes the elevation of the mountains and continents, the subsidence of the waters into their depressed basins, and the firm establishment of the dry land on its rocky foundations, the whole accompanied by a feature not noticed in Genesis--the voice of God's thunder--or, in other words, electrical and volcanic explosions. The following quotations refer to the same subject: "Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills was I (the Wisdom of God) brought forth; While as yet he had not made the earth, Nor the plains, nor the higher parts of the habitable world. When he gave the sea his decree That the waters should not pass his limits, When he determined the foundations of the earth." --Proverbs viii., 25.