in the most happy and convenient manner — making it the abode of men and nations, where sickness and death, even after the fall, could scarcely enter, except by violence.
One-half of the primitive earth's surface was water, and the other land; but the two elements were so mingled and arranged as that the exhalations, by the action of the sun's rays, produced a happy and an equal humidity of rains and dews, thus securing an equilibrium of temperature, health, and the growth of all things suitable for food, within the arctic and the antarctic circles. But when the flood came, it tore by its currents, shook and dissolved the beautiful earth, to a mass of entire chaos, as it was when it was first created, and before the water and the earthy matter were separated, by the Divine Power, primevally. Many regions of the ancient earth, where dwelt the first nations, between Adam and the flood, now lie buried beneath the weltering waves of seas and oceans.
This change of the ancient surface from land to a disproportionate quantum of water, produced, as already said, an entire alteration of the primitive climates, causing a corresponding revolution, in the products of the earth, on which men and animals were to subsist, unfavorable to health and long life; thus aiding in the abridgment of the age of man, from five, six, seven, eight, and even nine hundred years, down to the pitiful amount of "three score years and ten," or a little over, as it sometimes happens.
On this very account, the change of the earth's first climates from a steady, even temperament; to those of a more changeable character, impregnated
