The following are the objections to this interpretation: 1. The word _day_ is not used figuratively in other places of Genesis, (unless perhaps Gen. ii. 4,) though it is sometimes so used in other parts of Scripture. 2. In the fourth commandment, where the days of creation are referred to, (Exod. xx. 9, 10, 11,) no one can doubt but that the six days of labor and the Sabbath, spoken of in the ninth and tenth verses, are literal days. By what rule of interpretation can the same word in the next verse be made to mean indefinite periods? 3. From Gen. ii. 5, compared with Gen. i. 11, 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. 4. Such a meaning is forced and unnatural, and, therefore, not to be adopted without urgent necessity. 5. This hypothesis assumes that Moses describes the creation of all the animals and plants that have ever lived on the globe. But geology decides that the species now living, since they are not found in the rocks any lower down than man is, (with a few exceptions,) could not have been contemporaries with those in the rocks, but must have been created when man was; that is, on 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? If any one takes the ground that the existing races were created with the fossil ones, on the third and fifth days, then he must show, what no one can, why the remains of the former are not found mixed with the latter. 6. Though there is a general resemblance between the order of creation, as described in Genesis and by geology, yet when we look at the details of the creation of the organic world, as required by this hypothesis, we find manifest discrepancy, instead of the coincidence asserted by some distinguished advocates of these views. Thus the Bible represents plants only to have been created on the third day, and animals not till the fifth; and hence, at least, the lower half of the fossiliferous rocks ought to contain nothing but vegetables. Whereas, in fact, the lower half of these rocks, all below the carboniferous, although abounding in animals, contain scarcely any plants, and those in the lowest strata, fucoids, or sea-weeds. But the Mosaic account of the third day's work evidently describes flowering and seed-bearing plants, not flowerless and seedless algae. Again: reptiles are described in Genesis as created on the fifth day; but reptilia and batrachians existed as early as the time when the lower carboniferous, and even old red sandstone strata, were in a course of deposition, as their tracks on those rocks in Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania evince. In short, if we maintain that Moses