brew
_Aur_ (light) should be viewed as including heat and electricity as
well as light; and these three forces--if they are really distinct,
and not merely various movements of one and the same ether--are in
themselves, or the proximate causes of their manifestation, the prime
movers of the machinery of nature, the vivifying forces without which
the primeval desolation would have been eternal. The statement
presented here is, however, a bold one. Light without luminaries,
which were afterward formed--independent light, so to speak, shining
all around the earth--is an idea not likely to have occurred in the
days of Moses to the framer of a fictitious cosmogony, and yet it
corresponds in a remarkable manner with some of the theories which
have grown out of modern induction.

I have said that the Hebrew word translated "light" includes the
vibratory movements which we call heat and electricity as well. I make
this statement, not intending to assert that the Hebrews experimented
on these forces in the manner of modern science, and would therefore
be prepared to understand their laws or correlations as fully as we
can. I give the word this general sense simply because throughout the
Bible it is used to denote the solar light and heat, and also the
electric light of the thunder-cloud: "the light of His cloud," "the
bright light which is in the clouds." The absence of "_aur_,"
therefore, in the primeval earth, is the absence of solar radiation,
of the lightning's flash, and of volcanic fires. We shall in the
succeeding verses find additional reasons for excluding all these
phenomena from the darkness of the primeval night.

The light of the first day can not reasonably be supposed to have been
in any other than a visible and active state. Whether light be, as
supposed by the older physicists, luminous matter radiated with
immense velocity, or, as now appears more probable, merely the
undulations of a universally diffused ether, its motion had already
commenced. The idea of the matter of light as distinct from its power
of affecting the senses does not appear in the Scriptures any farther
than that the Hebrew name is probably radically identical with the
word ether now used to express the undulating medium by which light is
propagated; and if it did, the general creation of matter being stated
in verse 1, and the notice of the separation of light and darkness
being distinctly given in the present verse, there is no place left