"
This echo of Gregory of Nyssa was for many years of little
avail. Historians of philosophy still began with Adam, because
only a philosopher could have named all created things. There
was, indeed, one difficulty which had much troubled some
theologians: this was, that fishes were not specially mentioned
among the animals brought by Jehovah before Adam for naming. To
meet this difficulty there was much argument, and some
theologians laid stress on the difficulty of bringing fishes from
the sea to the Garden of Eden to receive their names; but
naturally other theologians replied that the almighty power which
created the fishes could have easily brought them into the
garden, one by one, even from the uttermost parts of the sea.
This point, therefore, seems to have been left in abeyance.[[196]]
It had continued, then, the universal belief in the Church
that the names of all created things, except possibly fishes,
were given by Adam and in Hebrew; but all this theory was whelmed
in ruin when it was found that there were other and indeed earlier
names for the same animals than those in the Hebrew language;
and especially was this enforced on thinking men when the
Egyptian discoveries began to reveal the pictures of animals with
their names in hieroglyphics at a period earlier than that agreed
on by all the sacred chronologists as the date of the Creation.
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