"I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void;
and the heavens, and they had no light." I conceive that there is no
more allusion to chaos in the one than in the other. The earth-disk lay
in its watery envelope, like the yolk of an egg in the _glaire,_ and the
spirit, or breath, of Elohim stirred the mass. Light was created as a
thing by itself; and its antithesis "darkness" as another thing. It
was supposed to be the nature of these two to alternate, and a pair of
alternations constituted a "day" in the sense of an unit of time.

The next step was, necessarily, the formation of that "firmament," or
dome over the earth-disk, which was supposed to support the celestial
waters; and in which sun, moon, and stars were conceived to be set, as
in a sort of orrery. The earth was still surrounded and covered by the
lower waters, but the upper were separated from it by the "firmament,"
beneath which what we call the air lay. A second alternation of darkness
and light marks the lapse of time.

After this, the waters which covered the earth-disk, under the
firmament, were drawn away into certain regions, which became seas,
while the part laid bare became dry land. In accordance with the notion,
universally accepted in antiquity, that moist earth possesses the
potentiality of giving rise to living beings, the land, at the command
of Elohim, "put forth" all sorts of plants. They are made to appear thus
early, not, I apprehend, from any notion that plants are lower in the
scale of being than animals (which would seem to be inconsistent with
the prevalence of tree worship among ancient people), but rather because
animals obviously depend on plants; and because, without crops and
harvests, there seemed to be no particular need of heavenly signs for
the seasons.

These were provided by the fourth day's work. Light existed already; but
now vehicles for the distribution of light, in a special manner and
with varying degrees of intensity, were provided. I conceive that the
previous alternations of light and darkness were supposed to go on; but
that the "light" was strengthened during the daytime by the sun, which,
as a source of heat as well as of light, glided up the firmament from
the east, and slid down in the west, each day. Very probably each
day's sun was supposed to be a new one. And as the light of the day was
strengthened by the sun, so the darkness of the night was weakened by
the moon, which regularly waxed and waned ev