In pursuing this investigation, I shall refrain from noticing in detail the views of the many able modern writers who, from Cuvier, De Luc, and Jameson, down to Hugh Miller, Donald McDonald, and Tayler Lewis, have maintained the period theory, or those equally numerous and able writers who have supported the opposite view. I acknowledge obligations to them all, but prefer to direct my attention immediately to the record itself. The first important fact that strikes us is one which has not received the attention it deserves, viz., that the word _day_ is evidently used in three senses in the record itself. We are told (verse 5th) that God called the _light_, that is, the diurnal continuance of light, day. We are also informed that the _evening_ and the _morning_ were the first day. Day, therefore, in one of these clauses is the light as separated from the darkness, which we may call the _natural day_; in the other it is the whole time occupied in the creation of light and its separation from the darkness, whether that was a _civil or astronomical day_ of twenty-four hours or some longer period. In other words, the daylight, to which God is represented as restricting the use of the term day, is only a part of a day of creation, which included both light and darkness, and which might be either a civil day or a longer period, but could not be the natural day intervening between sunrise and sunset, which is the _ordinary_ day of Scripture phraseology. Again, in the 4th verse of chapter ii., which begins the second part of the history, the whole creative week is called one day--"In the day that Jehovah Elohim made the earth and the heavens." Such an expression must surely in such a place imply more than a mere inadvertence on the part of the writer or writers.