The Hebrew New Year, observed on Thursday last, professes to be the anniversary of the world's creation. According to the calendar of the Synagogues, it is 5646 years since an inspiration of divine creative genius made the world and all there is in it. The Christian chronology dates the act of creation back to 4004 before Christ, which makes the age of the world 243 years greater than that at which the Jewish chronology fixes it. It is not likely, however, that intelligent Hebrews observed the feast of Rowsh Harshono with any idea that they were really assisting at the commemoration of the 5646th anniversary of the world's creation. The recently discovered stories of the rocks dispel the old-time notion of the youth of the earth and shows that its beginning is such countless ages back that the imagination cannot begin to conceive of it, and that it was brought into shape by such a series of progressive developments fitting it first for one form of life and afterwards for higher forms of existence till finally it became habitable for man—that it would be hard to say when the anniversary of its commencement should be celebrated—even if the time of creation were within the reach of human knowledge. The stars that light us on our way reflect the history of the earth's birth and growth. There's Saturn, only a nebula; Neptune, a fiery vapor; the Sun, a molten furnace; Mars, a heated crust that no human foot could rest upon; Earth, in the prime of manhood, teeming with life; Mercury on the decline, and the Moon, following us around for fear of being lost in the great immensity of space, a cold, hard, dried old woman that will fall by the roadside some day for want of vitality—the earth has been some of these and, if nothing untoward happens to her, must be the rest. Millions and millions of years must have been consumed in the processes that gathered the floating nebulae of the universe and welded them with fire and water into this beautiful globe we live upon, before man could find nourishment and existence here. And it may be that earth, in these successive stages of evolution, sustained other forms of life, and that a whole procession of unknown creatures, able to live upon her varying crust and in her variable atmosphere, have dominated her one after the other, till finally Man came to play his little part on the stage as the self-styled Lord of Creation. That is where the Jewish chronology and the Christian chronology assume to fix dates, and even as to that little fact the story of the rocks confounds them. But then it isn't probable that the Hebrews, in their anniversary festivities, pestered their brains over the historical aspects of the matter. They just saw a holiday ahead and went into make the most of it—in which they were just right.
