The first appearance of mammalia, as has been already noticed, must have been long before this, as the earliest fossils yet found are at the lower limit of the Lias.  They belong, however, to the genus Marsupialia, of which, as far as we know, no representatives were in existence in any part of the world known to Moses, so that even on the supposition that he intended to give an account of the first appearance of the classes of animals which he mentions, the omission of these would have been inevitable.  His words, however, appear to point to a time when the mammalia occupied the leading place, just as the reptiles had occupied the leading place at a previous epoch.  And his words are fully borne out by the records of the rocks.

At the close of the tertiary period great changes once more took place in the Northern hemisphere.  There was a great and extensive subsidence, in consequence of which a large portion of Northern and Middle Europe must have been under water, the mountain summits only appearing as detached islands.  At the same time, from causes utterly unknown to us, there was a great depression of temperature, the result of which was, that all, or nearly all the land, in those regions which were not submerged, was covered with glaciers, much as Greenland is now, and from these glaciers vast icebergs must from time to time have been detached by the sea and floated off, carrying with them fragments of rock, some freshly broken, some rounded by long attrition, which were deposited on the then submerged lands as the ice melted, and are now found as boulders, sometimes lying on the surface, at others dispersed through beds of clay and sand formed under water from the debris worn down by the glaciers.  A subsequent movement of elevation ushered in the state of things which exists on the earth at the present time.

2.  Man.

“And God said, Let Us make man (Adam) in Our image after Our likeness; and he shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

“And God created man (the Adam) in His image, in the image of God created He him; male and female He created them.

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the heaven, and over every animal that creepeth upon the earth.

“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb seeding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree which has in it the fruit of a tree seeding seed; to you it shall be for food.

“And to every animal of the earth, and to every fowl of the heaven, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, in which is the soul of life, every green herb is for meat; and it was so.

“And God saw every thing—­which He had made, and behold it was good exceedingly.