Here the high descent, and the origin from the soil, the ancestry referred to in the same breath with the allusion to his sire, "original with this earth," strikes one as incongruous. And the incongruity appears still greater when we recollect that Pelasgus is the person whom all historical evidence proves to have been the first settler in the country; it being also borne in mind that the term "autochthones," whether in a primary or a secondary sense, is always applied to the supposed aboriginals of the country, and therefore excludes the hypothesis of any more primitive colonisation.[108] [108] The Phoenician cosmogony seems to me to clinch the argument. There (_vide_ Bunsen, Egypt, iv. 234), "_The son of Eliun_ is called by Philo, Epigeios or _autokhthon_, 'the earth-born,' primeval inhabitant. By the latter of these expressions we have no doubt that Adam-Tadmon ('the Kadmos of the Greeks,' p. 195), the first man, the man of God, is implied" ("Eliun, _i.e._ Helyun, God the Most High," p. 232). There is an analogy in their confused tradition of the creation. "Eudemus says, according to the Phoenician mythology, which _was invented by Môkhos_, the first principle was æther and air; from these two beginnings sprang Ulômos (the eternal), the rational (conscious) God" (Bunsen, iv. 179). Bunsen, (178) adds, "as regards Môkhos the thing is clear enough; the old materialistic philosopher is matter, and that in the sense of primeval slime." [Whence it has been suggested that we derive our word Muck, Môkh, or Môkhos.] This beginning Bunsen considers (p. 179) "a philosophising amplification of the simply sublime words of Genesis: 'The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was over the face of the waters.'" Here we see the human reason hampered by the tradition that confused matter or chaos was somehow at the commencement, and with the conflicting tradition and conclusion of the intellect that it was, and must have been, created by a power superior to matter ("In the beginning God created heaven and earth"), emancipating itself, so far as to identify the Creator with the æther and air, as nearer the conception of a pure Spirit, and personifying matter, and so shunting it aside as the "inventor of the mythology."