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The Primæval Earth
The Primæval Earth
The Primæval Earth
branches, which lose themselves insensibly in the habit of the flesh as these little Floods did in the Sands of the
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FIGURE 34. The Primæval Earth, with its Zones or greater Climates, and the general order and tracts of its Rivers .
(From The Theory of the Earth; Thomas Burnet, 1697.)
Earthe." This is a very curious conception of the counter-course of "primæval" rivers; it is exactly as if we conceived
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of the Missouri-Mississippi system, for instance, as rising in the Gulf of Mexico and flowing north until it
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begins to divide and subdivide into dozens of lesser streams, all of which finally dwindle away into the Earth instead of rising from
it.
What was the state of the primæval Earth before man appeared, and with him, trouble? All the Creation stories
give a common answer--harmony; harmony of all the spheres. It is in the song to Mahat, with its ordered account of the
separation of the five great Elements from Chaos, and their recombinings into the bodies of the universe. "He made them all to
move evenly," says the Creation legend of the Lenape, after the Great Manito had formed land and sky and moon and stars; and
in the pictograph the even movement is a spiral line. In Sebastien Muenster's Cosmographia Universalis (1559), at the beginning
of the chapter on "The creation and disposing of the primordial Earth and Sea," is an old drawing evidently intended to show the
paradisaical state of terrestrial affairs at the end of the Fifth Day of Creation, with the
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great stage built and the great scene set and lighted for the entrance of man and the beginning of his dramaPlate( VI). It is a
picture in successive planes of the Genesis story, with a charming addition--the boat with sails, floating in the foreground; and, on
it, a little three-storied house--the Ark, perhaps, whose part in the coming drama had been already foreseen by the Creator, and
which was to become, of all the vanished treasures of a drowned and broken Earth, man's single precious possession.
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