In this paper, the author confined his attention principally to those words of the original, which, in the received translation, are rendered “without form and void.” He considered that, in a philological point of view, the most correct translation is “vastness and emptiness,” or, in the adjective form, “immeasurable and imponderable.”

The bearing of the most recent philosophical discoveries, and of the opinions of natural philosophers and geologists, upon the interpretation of this passage, formed the next subject of inquiry. It was stated that there are three prevailing opinions in regard to the Mosaic account of creation, arising out of three different views with respect to the period when those strata were formed which contain organic remains.