In verse 6 there was decreed an expanse or thinning (an attenuated region) in the center of the waters, and a separation was made by the formation of two "spots" (verse 7), one under the expanse and the other above the expanse; the expanse was space, interplanetary space. Professor Arnold Guyot, in his book on Creation, says, "It is to be regretted that the English version has translated the Hebrew word expanse by the word firmament.... The difficulties they [the commentators] have created for themselves arose ... from depriving it of its cosmogonic character and belittling it by reducing the great phenomena there described to a simple modification of the terrestrial atmosphere.... They forget that this thin covering of clouds is but a temporary and ever-changing one, and that the clouds are in that heaven rather than above it.... They forget that this is not the true heavens in which are spread the sun and moon and stars.... This grand day, so dwarfed and misunderstood, is the one in which are described the generations of the heavens, announced by Moses, which otherwise find no place in the narrative of the creative week." The two foci of waters were the solar and terrestrial; around these bodies were gathered by the attraction of gravity, and there condensed, the aqueous vapors from the attenuated intervening matter of space; the earth by its rotation generated the enormous electrical currents which still continue; when these made their mighty leap across to the sun, the diffused auroral light around the earth gradually disappeared, hydrogen and oxygen began to be evolved at the opposite poles--the sun and the earth--from the condensed envelopes of aqueous vapor which surrounded them, the sun's hydrogen atmosphere was pierced, as in the pail-of-water experiment described in an earlier chapter of the present work, by the planetary electric currents, the sun became incandescent, and pari passu the earth became fitted, by the development of oxygen, for the abode of animal life. As taking part in this great mechanical transformation, the sun was said to have been "made;" it did not "come into being." Just prior to the introduction of vegetable life--during the same creative epoch, in fact, and for the support of which life it was necessary--the waters under the expanse were condensed into rain-clouds and seas, and there is a curious reference (verse 9) to the appearance of the earth's dryness "as produced by the action of an internal fire;" the gradual cooling of the earth by the radiation of its internal heat of condensation into space would account for this appearance, and, in connection with the diffused auroral light throughout the whole sky, would doubtless have sufficed for the support of vegetable life.