CURRENT LITERATURE.
with the Mosaic record of the origin of things has been generally a failure. It does not necessarily follow, as some have gone so far as to assert, that the two are really at variance. But the her-
monists have been either theologians, with a mere smattering of science, or men of science with little or no knowledge of the Hebrew original, and the result has been that their disastrous failure has done more to shake the credibility of the received cosmogony than any- thing they have done has tended to strengthen it. In this book we have a new attempt—and certainly the most successful that has yet been made—to restore the belief that the records of creation in Jewish Scripture are a true revelation of the past, and we heartily commend the book to all those who are interested in this important question of divine authority. Dr. Daw- son is a man well known in the ranks of science for great breadth and grasp of knowledge; he has been a pioneer in geological dis- covery; he is also a considerable Hebrew scholar, well read in the Bible, and especially those parts which treat of Nature; and he has diligently studied the Assyrian inscriptions, which are so great a help in interpreting the sacred text. We feel, therefore, that we are entrusting ourselves to safe hands, for he has equal respect for both records, and does not twist nor pervert one to make it tally with the other, but boldly and fearlessly sets forth and grapples with the many difficulties presented. The author shows, that supposing such a revelation to be granted to man, it must, by the nature of the case, be in advance of science, although every fresh acquisition of know- ledge will help to explain what was before obscure and contradictory ; that in the present state of science the geological records of the pest do exactly agree with the corresponding history in Genesis, in spite of certain seeming discrepancies ; that science is wholly ignorant as to what took place before geological record began, but that the specu- lations of astronomers and physicists, notably Laplace, made on dis- tinct and independent grounds, respecting this anterior period, are anticipated in a remarkable way by the sacred writer ; and that he could not have obtained the necessary data for evolving these ideas out of his own observations. Altogether, it is a valuable addition to to Biblical criticism from a point of view higher, scientifically, than we have yet had.
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