The commencement of the result probably, if not necessarily, followed immediately on the issue of the finished command, viz., the promulgation of the forms to be obtained and the processes to be followed.  The whole result did not become accomplished then and there, in the time mentioned, or exactly in the order mentioned:  we know that for a fact.  Take, for example, the case of vegetation.  Here the author, in terms at once precise and universally intelligible, speaks of “vegetation[1]” (grass of the A.V.), “herb yielding seed,” and “trees yielding fruit,” thereby exhaustively enumerating the members of the vegetable kingdom.

[Footnote 1:  Nothing more is meant by the Hebrew “deshe.”  The true “grasses” (graminea),—­cereals, bamboos, &c., are certainly not intended, for these are all conspicuously flowering plants, “herbs yielding seed,” and therefore coming under the second plainly defined group.  But the general term “sproutage” or “vegetation” is just adapted to signify the mass of cryptogamic plant-life, the mosses, lichens, algae, and then ferns, &c., which evidently formed the first stage of plant-life on the globe.]

Now, as a matter of fact, there was no one long (or short) period during which the whole of this command was realized, before the next creative act occurred.

At first algae and low forms of vegetable life appeared; and doubtless we have lost myriads upon myriads of such lower forms of plant-life in the early strata, because such forms were ill calculated for fossil-preservation, owing to the absence of woody fibre, silicious casing, or hard fruit or seed vessels.  But when we first have a marked accumulation of specialized plant-life in the coal measures (Upper Carboniferous), it is still only of cryptogams—­ferns and great club mosses.  A beginning of true seed-bearing plants (Gymnosperm exogens) had been made with the conifers of the Devonian strata; but true grasses, and the other orders of phanerogamic plants and arboreous vegetation, do not appear till the tertiary rocks were deposited, very long after the age of fish and great reptiles had culminated, and the inauguration of the bird age and the mammalian age had taken place.

Looking only to the abundant, prominent, and characteristic life-forms of the several strata, it could certainly be said that the period when the water actually brought forth a vast mass of its life-forms—­corals, sertularias, crustaceans, and fish of the lower orders—­must have preceded (not followed) the time when the earth produced vegetation of all kinds, and further that it must have come after the appearance of scorpions and some land insects.[1]

[Footnote 1:  A single wing found little more than a year ago is the sole evidence of insects older than the Devonian; and scorpions (highly-organized crustaceans) have been found in the Upper Silurian in some abundance.]