Verse 25.  “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind:  and God saw that it was good.”

Verse 26.  “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:  and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

We come back to the second chapter: 

Verse 7.  “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

We return to the first chapter: 

Verse 27.  “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

We come back to the second chapter: 

Verse 8.  “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.”

Verse 9.  “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good

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for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

Verse 10.  “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden,” etc.

Here follows a description of the garden; it is a picture of a glorious world, of that age when the climate of the Bahamas extended to Spitzbergen.

Verse 15.  “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”

Here follows the injunction that “the man whom God had formed,” (for he is not yet called Adam—­the Adami—­the people of Ad,) should not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And then we have, (probably a later interpolation,) an account of Adam, so called for the first time, naming the animals, and of the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

And here is another evidence of the dislocation of the text, for we have already been informed (chap. i, v. 27) that God had made Man, “male and female”; and here we have him making woman over again from man’s rib.

Verse 25.  “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

It was an age of primitive simplicity, the primeval world; free from storms or ice or snow; an Edenic age; the Tertiary Age before the Drift.

Then follows the appearance of the serpent.  Although represented in the text in a very humble capacity, he is undoubtedly the same great creature which, in all the legends, brought ruin on the world—­the dragon, the apostate, the demon, the winding or crooked serpent of Job, the leviathan, Satan, the devil.  And as such he is regarded by the theologians.

He obtains moral possession of the woman, just as we

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have seen, in the Hindoo legends, the demon Ravana carrying off Sita, the representative of an agricultural civilization; just as we have seen Ataguju, the Peruvian god, seducing the sister of certain rayless ones, or Darklings.  And the woman ate of the fruit of the tree.