 Blackstone Audio presents A Brief History of Creation, Science and the Search for the Origin of Life by Bill Messler and H. James Cleaves II. This book is read by Sean Rennett. For our mothers. Not everything mentioned in the Torah concerning the account of the beginning is as the vulgar imagine. For if the matter were such, the sages would not have expatiated on its being kept secret. The correct thing to do is to refrain, if one lacks all knowledge of the sciences, from considering those texts merely with the imagination. Mymonides. The Guide for the Perplexed, Circa 1190. Prathis. It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn, and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense the physical secrets of the world. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. 1818. The sea floor was dark green, sloped like the outer edges of a huge jade dome, and cut by deep chasms and steep ravines. There were few signs of life. Hardly anything could be seen living that deep in the ocean, only a few slumbering giant clams in the occasional tube worm, some as large as eight feet long. Every so often one of the enormous worms would puff out a blood-red plume that would linger in the water like octopus ink, drifting past enormous white pinnacles that dotted the landscape. The largest towered sixteen stories above the ocean floor. Their surfaces were rough like bark, giving them the organic appearance of trees in some alien forest, spreading their branches toward the sun. But no sunlight could penetrate that deep. A full half-mile below the surface of the ocean, the ghostly pinnacles had never seen any kind of light at all until they were illuminated by the first dim flickers of a strobe light, fastened to a lumbering metal craft that crept slowly above the ocean floor. The Argo was about the size of a long canoe enclosed by a large metal cage resting on sled-like rails. It didn't look like much, but the little unmanned craft already had a long and storied history. The Argo had taken part in some of the most important deep sea explorations ever conducted, and it found the wrecks of both the Titanic and the Bismarck. It carried some of the most sophisticated oceanographic sensors and cameras. Sample complete. Ready to continue?