And then, no sooner had the flame-crowned seer won her precious prize, than, woman-like, she turned and laid it before her husband, and he, the innocent one, "did eat." The serpent was not a mere snake, be it understood; it was the Egyptian Typhon, the dark Spirit of doubt, the questioner, the tempter, the eternal if, the why, whence, what, and whither? It was her insatiable aspiration to reach the highest possible limits of human knowledge which gave strength to her daring, and not a childish fancy for an apple. All this, of course, is lost in the translation. It is as though the national standard of a mighty people had been disinterred from the remains of past ages, which had been borne aloft at the head of mighty armies for centuries, and for which thousands had gloriously died in battle in defence of a sacred cause, and which now, its past history untraced, has been catalogued as a brass bird of some sort mounted on a stick. It is to be regretted that there is no plain, popular work by a thoroughly capable scholar, without theological or anti-theological bias, which treats of the origin, form, root-derivation, usage, accurate signification, and construction of the comparatively few words employed in the ancient narratives which compose the first half-dozen chapters of Genesis, and, we may add, the book of Job; something like those inestimable works which deal with the ancient cosmogonic literature of Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, India, China, Phoenicia, and Central America. Nothing of this sort is to be found, at all events in a form accessible to the general reader, and such a work, in small compass, would be of the highest importance to popular instructors, to students, and to the public as well, for it would throw a flood of light on these extremely valuable but, hitherto, so illy-comprehended records. THE MOSAIC NARRATIVE OF CREATION. 1. Aleim, the Forces, fashioned like the work of a sculptor, in the commencement of individualized existence, the individualized substance of the heavens and the individualized substance of the earth. 2. And the earth was in tomb-like darkness and undeveloped, and there was compressive hindering darkness on the surface of undifferentiated nature. And the dilating and liberating Spirit of the Forces hovered with incubating love on the surface of the seeds of all beings, the waters. 3. Then Aleim said, There shall be a diffused light; and a diffused light was. 4. And Aleim regarded with attention the individualized substance of the diffused light, because good. And Aleim caused a separation to be made between the diffused light and between the compressive hindering darkness. 5. Then Aleim exclaimed for the diffused light, Day! and for the compressive hindering darkness exclaimed, Night! And there was a transition from light to darkness, and then there was a renewal of light; First Day.