(4.) It has been urged that in cases where day is used to denote period, as in the expressions "day of calamity," etc., the adjuncts plainly show that it can not mean an ordinary day. In answer to this, I merely refer to the internal evidence already adduced, and to the deliberate character of the statements, in the manner rather of the description of processes than of acts. The difficulties attending the explanation of the evening and the morning, and the successive creation of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, are also strong indications which should serve here to mark the sense, just as the context does in the cases above referred to. (5.) In Professor Hitchcock's valuable and popular "Religion of Geology," I find some additional objections, which deserve notice as specimens of the learned trifles which pass current among writers on this subject, much to the detriment of sound Scriptural literature. I give them in the words of the author. 1. "From Genesis ii., 5 compared with Genesis i., 11 and 12, it seems that it had not rained on the earth till the third day; a fact altogether probable if the days were of twenty-four hours, but absurd if they were long periods." It strikes us that the absurdity here is all on the side of the short days. Why should any prominence be given to a fact so common as the lapse of two ordinary days without rain, more especially if a region of the earth and not the whole is referred to, and in a document prepared for a people residing in climates such as those of Egypt and Palestine. But what could be more instructive and confirmatory of the truth of the narrative than the fact that in the two long periods which preceded the formation and clearing up of the atmosphere or firmament, on which rain depends, and the elevation of the dry land, which so greatly modifies its distribution, there had been no rain such as now occurs. This is a most important fact, and one of the marked coincidences of the record with scientific truth. The objection, therefore, merely shows that the ordinary day hypothesis tends to convert one of the finest internal harmonies of this wonderful history into an empty and, in some respects, absurd commonplace. 2. "This hypothesis (that days are long periods) assumes that Moses describes the creation of all the animals and plants that have ever lived on our globe. But geology decides that the species now living, since they are not found in the rocks any lower than man is,[55] could not have been contemporaneous with those in the rocks, but must have been created when man was--that is, in the sixth day. Of such a creation no mention is made in Genesis; the inference is that Moses does not describe the creation of the existing races, but only of those that lived thousands of years earlier, and whose existence was scarcely suspected till modern times. Who will admit such an absurdity?" In answer to this objection, I remark that it is based on a false assumption.