NOTES. Note [I.] On the Mosaic Days of Creation. The learned and pious author of the Treatise on the Three Dispensations, in the geological disquisition which he has introduced, as it were episodically, into that work, has made a very strenuous effort, (which I have observed with extreme regret, and with equal astonishment;) to secure to the word day, in the first chapter of Genesis, that distracting and improbable vagueness of signification, which shall render it available to denote measures of time from twenty-four hours to six thousand years, and even to periods wholly undetermined ; adding, I must risk to say, intensity to the error which has already too much prevailed upon this philological and critical question. “ In Scripture,” says he, “ nothing can well be more in- “ definite than the term which we translate by the English « word day: — in truth, the term, abstractedly, would be « more accurately expressed by the English word period “ than by the English word day 1 .” These allegations, he thinks, " may be proved, partly “ by the analogy of language, partly by the very necessity “ of the narrative, partly by ancient tradition, and partly 1 Vol. i. p. Ill, 112. The sublime researches and speculations, and the ingenious expositions of this learned work, do not in any manner depend upon the confirmation of the geological theory which forms the third chapter of the first volume; and which is entirely distinct from, and extraneous to, its general argument-
