In this way was formed a broad disk of earth, floating on the circumambient air.
A fragment of such a paste brought into a liquid in which the solid particles are soluble, slowly expands into a honeycomb like foam, the walls of the minute vesicles being films of oil, and the contents being the soluble particles dissolved in droplets of the circumambient liquid.
Such differentiations and integrations of living bodies are the subject-matter of discussions on evolution; some will see in the play of circumambient media, natural or supernatural, on the simplest forms of living matter, sufficient explanation of the development of such matter into the highest forms of living organisms; others will regard the potency of such living matter so to develop as a mysterious and peculiar quality that must be added to the conception of life.
In a prayer addressed to " First birth of my birth, first beginning (or principle) of my beginning, first spirit of the spirit in me," he prays " to be restored to his deathless birth (genesis), albeit he is let a.nd hindered by his underlying nature, to the end that according to the pressing need and spur of his longing he may gaze upon the deathless principle with deathless spirit, through the deathless water, through the solid and the air; that he may be re-born through reason (or idea), that he may be consecrated, and the holy spirit breathe in"him, that he may admire the holy fire, that he may behold the abyss of the Orient, dread water, and that he may be heard of the quickening and circumambient ether; for this day he is about to gaze on the revealed reality with deathless eyes; a mortal born of mortal womb, he has been enhanced in excellence by the might of the All-powerful and by the right hand of the Deathless one," &c.