Upon this principle we understand the expression, ' the Lord God planted,' caused to grow, placed; he, the supreme and omnipotent cause, produced those effects, in ways, immediate or mediate, the most worthy of his perfections.
II. The situation of Eden : though nil* is liter ally from the east, it answers to our phrase on the east or eastwards, precisely as the Latin ab occasu. The supposed station-point we cannot suppose to be any other than Palestine. In every country, the region of the rising sun must always be pre-eminent, on account of the beauty and majesty of the sky; and hence it is a natural representative of excel lence; and this most interesting of regions, the birth-place of mankind, did lie eastward from the land of the Israelites. Also, the earliest traditions of human and divine knowledge were associated with the splendours of the east.
Upon the question of its exact geographical posi tion dissertations innumerable have been written. Many authors have given descriptive lists of them, with arguments for and against each. The most convenient presentation of their respective outlines has been reduced to a tabulated form, with ample illustrations, by the Rev. N. Morren, annexed to his Translation of the younger Rosenmiiller's Bibli cal Geography of Central Asia, pp. 91-98, Edin. 1836. He reduces them to nine principal theories. But the fact is that not one of them answers to all the conditions of the problem. We more than doubt the possibility of finding any locality that will do so. That Phrat is the Euphrates, and Hitidekel the Tigris, is agreed, with scarcely an exception; out in determining the two other rivers, great di versity of opinion exists ; and, to our apprehension, satisfaction is and must remain unattainable, from the impossibility of making the evidence to cohere in all its parts. It has been remarked that this difficulty might have been expected, and is obvi ously probable, from the geological changes that may have taken place, and especially in connection with the deluge. This remark would not be appli cable, to the extent that is necessary for the argu ment, except upon the supposition before mentioned, that the earlier parts of the book of Genesis consist of primeval documents, even antediluvian, and that this is one of them. There is reason to think that Owe the deluge the face of the country cannot have andergone any change approaching to what the hypothesis of a postdiluvian composition would require. But we think it highly probable that the
principal of the immediate causes of the deluge, the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep,' was a subsidence of a large part or parts of the land between the inhabited tract (which we humbly venture to place in E. long. from Greenwich, 30° to 90°, and N. lat. to and the sea which lay to the south ; or an elevation of the bed of that sea [DELUGE]. Either of these occurrences, pro duced by volcanic causes, or both of them con jointly or successively, would be adequate to the production of the awful deluge, and the return of the waters would be effected by an elevation of some part of the district which had been sub merged ; and that part could scarcely fail to be charged with animal remains. Now the recent geological researches of Dr. Falconer and Capt. Cautley have brought to light bones, more or less mineralized, of the giraffe (camelopardalis,) in the Sewalik range of hills, which seems to be a branch of the Himalaya, westward of the river Jumna. But the giraffe is not an animal that can live in a mountainous region, or even on the skirts of such a region ; its subsistence and its safety require an open country and broad plains to roam over' (Falconer and Cautley, in Proceed. Geol. Soc., Nov. 15, 1843). The present position, therefore, of these fossil remains (` of almost every large pachydermatous genus, such as the elephant, mas todon, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, sus (swine), horse, etc.' ib., also deer and oxen)—lodged in ravines and vales among the peaks, at vast eleva tions—leads to the supposition of a late elevation of extensive plains.
Thus we seem to have a middle course pointed out between the two extremes ; the one, that by the deluge the ocean and the land were made to exchange places for permanency ; the other, that very little alteration was produced in the configura tion of the earth's surface. Indeed, such alteration might not be considerable in places very distant from the focus of elevation; but near that central district it could not but be very great. An altera tion of level, five hundred times less than that effected by the upthrow of the Himalayas, would change the beds of many rivers, and quite obliterate others.