"
This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the
Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before
Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the
garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen
upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a
rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he
must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the
ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and
fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly,
the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and
it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis,[2] only "thorns and
thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving
stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just
as in Job we are told:
Chap. xxx, verse 3. "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing
into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary."
[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 65.
2.
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