Our author gives no references which the reader may examine for himself. There can be little doubt that he points to the exceedingly grand and impressive passage at the opening of the book of Genesis. But in that passage there is nothing to support the statement that "the flat figure of the earth" is part of Bible revelation. That the earth has been supposed flat, and that this is really taught in Scripture, are two very different things. The Bible which says, that "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep," and records the will of the Supreme Ruler at a later stage in these words, "And God said let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear,"[U] does something quite the opposite of teaching that "the earth is a flat surface." Nor do the Scriptures teach that "the earth sustains the dome of the sky." In remote times such an opinion as to the resting-place for the great dome had its supporters. But there is no pretext for attributing the teaching of this to the Bible. The scriptural statement is "God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven." There is no reader of these words, even if he have only "an uncritical observation of the aspect of nature," who can suppose that the "firmament" here means "the dome of the sky." This statement places certain waters "_above_ the firmament," and there is no one who is at once a reader of the Bible, and an observer of nature, who thinks of the clouds as above the sky; but every one knows that there is an expanse which bears these water treasures far up from the earth's surface. The word rendered "firmament,"[V] from the Vulgate _firmamentum_, really means "expanse," and most naturally and obviously refers to the atmosphere surrounding the earth, upon which the clouds are borne aloft, and carried to and fro. Taking into account the want of scientific knowledge of the structure of the earth in far past ages, and the representations inconsistent with facts which found currency, the true marvel is that the statements of Scripture so simply and naturally harmonize with discoveries not made till the sixteenth century of the Christian era. This is a marvel which will more deeply impress us the longer it is pondered.