Through the abpve parody upon nature, Cosmas explained all celestial phenomena —
the course of the moon, its phases and eclipses, as well as the sun’s rotation round the
earth’s flat plain. The Topographia Christiana became the text-book of ecclesiastical orthodoxy,
for above 800 years, down to Galileo; and Cosmas’s caricature on the one hand
coupled with ignorance of the Hebrew text of Joshua (x. 12-14) on the other, induced the
murder of Giordano Bruno.
Nevertheless, according to the literal language of the first IX chapters of “ Genesis”
Cosmas was not far from the truth. Were the ancient writers of those' chapters to arise
from the grave, and were they respectfully requested to indicate which commentary best
represented their meaning — that of the Topographia Christiana ; or those recent attempts
“ to make Moses sound in the faith of the geological section of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science ” 701 — they would unanimously claim the former as their own.
Happy middle-ages; when Europe made up in credulity what*it lacked in intelligence!
“ They had neither looked into heaven, nor earth; neither into the sea, nor the land, as
has been done since. They had philosophy without scale, astronomy without demonstration.
They made war without powder, shot, cannon, or mortars; nay, the mob made bonfires
without squibs or crackers. They, went to sea without compass, and sailed lacking
chronometers. They viewed the stars without telescopes, and measured altitudes without
barometers. Learning had no printing-press, writing no paper, paper no in k ; magnetism
no telegraph, iron no rails, steam no boilers. The lover was forced to send his mistress a
deal-board for a love-letter, and a billet-doux might be of the size of a trencher. They were
clothed without manufactures, and the richest robes were the skins of formidable monsters.
They carried on trade without books, and correspondence without postage: their merchants
kept no ledgers; their shopkeepers no cash-books. They had surgery without anatomy,
physicians without materia-medica; who gave emetics Without ipecacuanha, and cured
agues without quinine. They dispensed with lucifer-matches, coffee, sugar, tea, and tobacco”
702 — and? never having heard of the first three chapters of “ Genesis,” they believed
in Topographia Christiana I
The book is scarcely known, now-a-days, to theologers;. but its commentary (orally transmitted
from father to son) survives all around us. We have conceived it our duty not to
let the one continue without the other; and therefore have rescued from further oblivion
the Mosaic chart of Cosmas.
S e c t i o n S .— A n t i q u i t y o f t h e n am e “ADaM.”
After what has been already set forth, there seems scarcely reason
to answer an interrogatory, above propounded, relative to “ human
creation ” as narrated in Genesis. Archaeological criticism might
finally rest upon one Hebrew word; viz. ADaM.
The philological law of triliterals, in Semitic tongues, has been touched upon during previous
examinations of Xth Genesis. “ Non omnia pdssumus” — and the authors must
reiterate that, in order to keep within one volume, they have been forced to e x p u rg a te
redundancies, often, they fear, at the sacrifice of perspicuity. In lieu of extracts f rom the
pages of Lanci, Meyer, Gesenius, Neumann, Ewald, Wilhelm von Humboldt, P ric h a rd ,
Bunsen,—in addition to those previously drawn from Rawlinson, Be Saulcy, &c. — all corroborating
our correctness, we must substitute references to their authoritative works.
The reader will observe, notwithstanding, that the bisyllable ADM cannot be a prim itiv e
but must be a secondary formation, according to the progressive scale of linguistic development.
To reach the primary root, or monosyllable, within this triliteral word contained,
an affix, a suffix, or a medial-letter, must be first removed. Among Hebraists of the hig h est
modern school, on the European continent, the fact that “ Adam” is a dissyllabic n a m e alone
suffices to prove that its possessor appeared on earth thousands of years subsequently to
the primordial ages of humanity; because in principio man articulated but monosyllables.
Or else (what is the same thing in result, no less than more positive) the Israelite who
(in some form of com-letter) wrote the word ADM, of Genesis, lived at a philological epoch
when the pristine monosyllables had already (organically through development) merged into
words of two syllables; and therefore, that writer committed an egregious anachronism
when he retro-leptically ascribed a triliteral proper-name, or rather noun, to his first human
progenitor.
The word ADM, or with an additional'vowel, ADaM, is consequently to be divided into
two separate words, A and DaM; or A-DaM. Now, A, aleph, is the primeval, Semitic,
masculine article A = “ the” : 703 an article that, in Scripture-, is prefixed to above forty
masculine substantives; although, until recently, the fact was unperceived by Hebrew
grammarians, or Jewish lexicographers.
In the next place, the word ADaM does not proceed, as the Rabbis suppose, from
ADaMaH (Gen. ii. 7)—a bisyllable, from a trisyllable!—but the latter is an extension of the
former root, DaM (Arabicé, Dem), meaning blood; the color of which, being red, originated
the secondary signification of DaM, as “ red; ” and “ to be red.”
Consequently, A, the letter “ aleph” being the masculine article the; and the noun DaM
meaning blood, or “ red,” we have only to unite these two words into A-DaM, to read the-
blood, or t h e -r e d , in “ Genesis ;” which duplex substantive,- applied to man, naturally signifies
“ the-red-mun; ” and, when applied to the ground, ADaMaH (“ out of the dust” of
which this the-red-man, ADaM, was moulded), it means the-red-earth: i. e., that rubescent
soil out-.of which the Jehovistic writer of Genesis lid imagined Hebrew man to have been
fashioned by Creative artisanship. The BeNi-ADaM also, in Psalms (xlix. 2. Comp. Ps.
lxii. 9: and contrast with BeNoTí-HaADaM, Gen. vi. 2), are reputed to be patricians of the
pure Abrahamic stock; whereas the plebeians (including all those who are, like Anglo-
Saxons, mere GOIM, Gentiles) belong altogether to a different and lower l evel . . . in the
eye of IeHOuaH.
We adopt entirely the Italian rendering of the great interpreter of Sacred Philology at
the Vatican; and think, with Lanci, that il-rossicante, “ the-Blusher,” is the happiest translation
of the old Semitic particle and noun A-DaM.
How does this interpretation bear upon ethnography?
Reader! simply thus. As no “ Type of Mankind ” but the white race can be said (physiologically)
to blush ; it follows, that, according to the conception of the writers of Genesis
(who were Jews and of the “ white race ”), not only did the first human pair converse between
themselves, no less than with God and with the serpent, in pure Hebrew, but they
were essentially A-DaM¿¿es (m?-man and woman) “ blushers: ” — and therefore, these Hebrew
writers, never supposed that A-DaM and ISE (vulgaricé, Adam and Eve) could have
been of any stock than of the white type—in short, Hebrews, Abrahamidce, like themselves
these writers aforesaid.
Thus, through a few cuts of an archmological scalpel, vanishes the last illusion that any
but white “ Types of Mankind ” are to be found in the first three chapters of the book called
“ Genesis.”
The “ Chinese ” having been carefully removed further on from connection with the Mesopotamian
SINIM of Isaiah (xlix. 12), nothing remains but to refer the reader to the map
[suprayp . 552] we have given of Xth Genesis for the whole of Ethnography comprehended
by the writers of the Old Testament: Strabo, who followed Eratosthenes about b . c. 15,
furnishing every possible information upon what of geography was attainable, in the first
century after c., by the writers of the New.
The present authors have asserted these results before.