Verse 6.  “But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.”

This is extraordinary:  there was no rain.

A mere inventor of legends certainly had never dared make a statement so utterly in conflict with the established order of things; there was no necessity for him to do so; he would fear that it would throw discredit on all the rest of his narrative; as if he should say, “at that time the grass was not green,” or, “the sky was not blue.”

{p. 321}

A world without rain!  Could it be possible?  ’Did the writer of Genesis invent an absurdity, or did he record an undoubted tradition?  Let us see: 

Rain is the product of two things—­heat which evaporates the waters of the oceans, lakes, and rivers; and cold which condenses them again into rain or snow.  Both heat and cold are necessary, In the tropics the water is sucked up by the heat of the sun; it rises to a cooler stratum, and forms clouds; these clouds encounter the colder air flowing in from the north and south, condensation follows, accompanied probably by some peculiar electrical action, and then the rain falls.

But when the lemon and the banana grew in Spitzbergen, as geology assures us they did in pre-glacial days, where was the cold to come from?  The very poles must then have possessed a warm climate.  There were, therefore, at that time, no movements of cold air from the poles to the equator; when the heat drew up the moisture it rose into a vast body of heated atmosphere, surrounding the whole globe to a great height; it would have to pass through this cloak of warm air, and high up above the earth, even to the limits of the earth-warmth, before it reached an atmosphere sufficiently cool to condense it, and from that great height it would fall as a fine mist.

We find an illustration of this state of things on the coast of Peru, from the river Loa to Cape Blanco,[1] where no rain ever falls, in consequence of the heated air which ascends from the vast sand wastes, and keeps the moisture of the air above the point of condensation.

Or it would have to depend for its condensation on the difference of temperature between night and day, settling

[1.  “American Cyclopædia,” vol. xiii, p. 387.]

{p. 322}

like a dew at night upon the earth, and so maintaining vegetation.

What a striking testimony is all this to the fact that these traditions of Genesis reach back to the very infancy of human history—­to the age before the Drift!

After the creation of the herbs and plants, what came next?  We go back to the first chapter: 

Verse 21.  “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind:  and God saw that it was good.”

Verse 22.  “And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let the fowl multiply in the earth.”