while the monarchs of the Mesopotamian region seem to have been
equally unambitious of conquest beyond the mountain ranges which
bounded the valley of the Tigris on the east. Mesopotamia, then,
on the east, Egypt on the west, Armenia and Asia Minor on the
north, and Arabia on the south, seem, in the view of the
contemporaries of Moses, to have been the utmost regions of the
world. Ignorant as they were of any countries beyond these, they
were, of course, equally ignorant of the numberless varieties of
plants and animals that were to be found in them, and with which
we are familiar. Mining was not unknown, but the mines were few
and superficial; they could not reveal much of the structure of
the earth, and what little they did reveal passed unnoticed.
Nothing was known of the successive beds of rock which form the
crust of the earth, of the fossils with which they abound, or of
the gradual changes to Which they are still subject. If any one
had told the men of that generation that the solid earth on which
they stood, or the everlasting hills which surrounded them, were
undergoing slow but steady modifications, he would have been
looked upon as a madman.

A revelation, then, addressed to men whose language, whose
intellectual powers, and whose stock of ideas were thus limited,
must of itself also necessarily have been both limited and
destitute of precision. It could only deal with things with which
they had some acquaintance, or of which they could form some idea,
while, from the character of the language, and the extreme brevity
of the record, the treatment of even these few subjects must have
been of a vague and indefinite character. Traces of a deeper
knowledge there might be, but they would not lie upon the surface.
They must be carefully sought for, and then they would be