placed that of the ferocious beasts
that preceded him in dominion, and had extended at least over all the
temperate region of the earth. 4. The cursing of the ground for man's
sake, on his fall from innocence, would thus consist in the
permission given to the predaceous animals and the thorns and the
briers of other centres of creation to invade his Eden; or, in his own
expulsion, to contend with the animals and plants which were intended
to have given way and become extinct before him. Thus the fall of man
would produce an arrestment in the progress of the earth in that last
great revolution which would have converted it into an Eden; and the
anomalies of its present state consist, according to Scripture, in a
mixture of the conditions of the tertiary with those of the human
period. 5. Though there is good ground for believing that man was to
have been exempted from the general law of mortality, we can not infer
that any such exemption would have been enjoyed by his companion
animals; we only know that he himself would have been free from all
annoyance and injury and decay from external causes. We may also
conclude that, while Eden was sufficient for his habitation, the
remainder of the earth would continue, just as in the earlier tertiary
periods, under the dominion of the predaceous mammals, reptiles, and
birds. 6. The above views enable us on the one hand to avoid the
difficulties that attend the admission of predaceous animals into
Eden, and on the other the still more formidable difficulties that
attend the attempt to exclude them altogether from the Adamic world.
They also illustrate the geological fact that many animals,
contemporaneous with man, extend far back into the Tertiary period.
These are creatures not belonging to the Edenic centre of creation,
but introduced in an earlier part of the sixth day, and now permitted
to exist along with man in his fallen state. I have stated these
supposed conditions of the Adamic creation briefly, and with as little
illustration as possible, that they may connectedly strike the mind of
the reader. Each of these statements is in harmony with the
Scriptural narrative on the one hand, and with geology on the other;
and, taken together, they afford an intelligible history of the
introduction of man. If a geologist were to state, _a priori_, the
conditions proper to the creation of any important species, he could
only say--the preparation or selection of some region of the eart