till after the fall, or even after the deluge. This hypothesis seems to lessen the difficulty, but it overlooks the fact that the grasses, leaves, seeds, and fruits, which are the food of the herbivorous races, swarm with insect life. The supposition that the carnivorous animals could at any time have fed upon vegetables, cannot be entertained for a moment, except it were by a person quite ignorant of the anatomical structure of those animals. Their bones and muscles, their teeth, claws, stomachs, and intestines, demonstrate that they were created to be nourished solely by animal food."[1] This last remark agrees with the suggestion before made, that if what are now fierce animals did exist before the fall, they must have been very different both in nature and structure from what they now are—so different indeed as to be hardly recognizable as the same animals; and we therefore expressed it as a more rational belief, that they did not exist at all. Upon Dr. Smith's objection to the second hypothesis, that, while it lessens the difficulty, "it overlooks the fact that the grasses, leaves, seeds, and fruits, which are the food of the herbivorous races, swarm with insect life"—we would make the comment, that the writer himself overlooks the view that those insects themselves had no existence at that time—that these are to be classed among the noxious vermin which had no being till man brought sin into the world. Loathsome and destructive insects could not, as already remarked, have existed in Eden;—it is impossible that they could have been among the things which the Creator pronounced "good" and "very good."
No! we. hold the conviction—and it is a view sus-
- ↑ Geology and Scripture, Supplementary Note, A.
