PART II.

A century has not yet gone by since all the organic remains on which the

science of Palæontology is now founded were regarded as the wrecks of a

universal deluge, and held good in evidence that the waters had

prevailed in every known country, and risen over the highest hills.

Intelligent observers were not wanting at even an earlier time who

maintained that a temporary flood could not have occasioned phenomena so

extraordinary. Such was the view taken by several Italian naturalists of

the seventeenth century, and in Britain by the distinguished

mathematician Hooke, the contemporary, and in some matters rival, of

Newton. But the conclusions of these observers, now so generally

adopted, were regarded both in Popish and Protestant countries as but

little friendly to Revelation; and so strong was the opposite opinion,

and so generally were petrifactions regarded as so many proofs of a

universal deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, first in his

Dissertation drawn up for the Academy at Bologna, and next in his

article on shells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up the

question as charged with one of the evidences of that Revelation which

it was the great design of his life to subvert. And with an unfairness

too characteristic of his sparkling but unsolid writings, we find him

arguing, that all fossil shells were either those of fresh water lakes

and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or of land snails developed in

unusual abundance during wet ones; or that they were shells which had

been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land

to their homes; or that they were shells that had gone astray from

cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not shells at all, but

mere shell-like forms, produced by some occult process of nature in the

bowels of the earth. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the

Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in

his attempts to neutralize that Palæontologic evidence on which

geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he

only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every

sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a

reaction against the special school of infidelity which he had founded,

that at length bore it down. He wrote in the middle of the Paris basin,

with its multitude of fossil shells and bones; and, when penning his

article for the Encyclopædia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the

shell-charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before him; but

the deluge had to be put down, whatever the nature or bearing of the

facts; and so he could find in either no evidence of a time when the sea

had covered the land. He found, instead, only "some mussels, because

there were ponds in the neighborhood." As for the "spiral petrifactions

termed _cornu ammonis_," of which the Jurassic Alps are full, they were

not nautili, he said; they could be nothing else than reptiles; seeing

that reptiles take almost always the form of a spiral when not in

motion; and it was surely more likely, that when petrified they should

still retain the spiral disposition, than that "the Indian Ocean should

have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." Were there not,

however, real shells of the Syrian type in France and Italy? Perhaps

so. But ought "we not to recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of

pilgrims who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought back

shells? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon

had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming shells of the

less superficial deposits, "Are we sure," he inquired, "that the soil of

the earth cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens contains its

apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable

they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner,

produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake

or river petrifactions?--one never sees among them "true marine

substances"!! "If there _were_ any, why have we never seen bones of sea

dogs, sharks, and whales?"!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief

apparently that he had to deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too

little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in

behalf of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail

him, he could vanquish with a joke.

There was, however, a young German, who had not at the time quite made

up his mind either for the French school or against it, who was no

uninterested reader of Voltaire's disquisitions on fossil shells. And

this young man was destined to be in the coming age what the Frenchman

had been in the closing one,--the leading mind of Europe. He, too, had

been looking at fossils; and having no case to make out either for or

against Moses, or any one else, he had received in a fair and candid

spirit the evidence with which they were charged. And the gross

dishonesty of Voltaire in the matter formed so decided a turning point

with him, that from that time forward he employed his great influence in

bearing down the French school of infidelity, as a school detestably

false and hollow;--a warning, surely, to all, whether they stand up for

Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, like the witty

Frenchman, "wicked overmuch." "To us youths," says Goethe, in his

Autobiography, "with our German love of truth and nature, the factious

dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects,

became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in

our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion

and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called

it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now

learned, that to weaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all

petrified shells, and only admitted them as _lusus naturæ_, he entirely

lost my confidence; for my own eyes had on the Baschberg plainly enough

shown me that I stood on the bottom of an old dried-up sea, among the

_exuviæ_ of its ancient inhabitants. These mountains had certainly been

once covered with waves,--whether before or during the Deluge did not

concern me: it was enough that the valley of the Rhine had been a

monstrous lake,--a bay extending beyond the reach of eyesight: out of

this I was _not_ to be talked. I thought much more of advancing in the

knowledge of lands and mountains, let what would be the result." I know

not in the whole history of opinion a more instructive passage than

this. Little could Voltaire have known what he was in reality doing, or

how egregiously he was overreaching himself, when, in laboring to bear

down the evidence borne by fossils to the ancient upheavals and

cataclysms, he suffered himself to make use of assertions and arguments

so palpably unfair. And those who employ, in their zeal against the

geologists, what is still exceedingly common,--the Voltairean style of

argument,--especially if they employ it in what they deem the behalf of

religion, might do well to inquire whether they are not in some little

danger of producing the Voltairean result.

No man acquainted with the general outlines of Palæontology, or the true

succession of the sedimentary formations, has been able to believe,

during the last half century, that any proof of a general deluge can be

derived from the _older_ geologic systems,--Palæozoic, Secondary, or

Tertiary. It has been held, however, by accomplished geologists, within

even the last thirty years, that such proof might be successfully sought

for in what are known as the superficial deposits. Such was the belief

of Cuvier,--a man who, even in geologic science, which was certainly not

his peculiar province, exerted a mighty influence over the thinking of

other men. "I agree with MM. Deluc and Dolomieu in thinking," we find

him saying, in his widely famed "Theory of the Earth," "that if anything

in geology be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has

undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of which cannot be

referred to a much earlier period than five or six thousand years ago."

But from the same celebrated work we learn that Cuvier held that this

sudden catastrophe,--occasioned, as he supposed, by an elevation of the

sea bottom and a submergence of the previously existing land,--had _not_

been universal; seeing he could entertain the belief that the three

great races of the human family,--Ethiopian, Mongolian, and

Caucasian,--had all escaped from it in several directions. In referring

to the marked peculiarities of the Mongolian race, so very distinct from

the Caucasian, he merely intimates, that he was "tempted to believe

their ancestors and ours had escaped the great catastrophe on different

sides;" but in dwelling on the still more marked peculiarities of the

Negroes, we find him explicitly stating, that, "all their characters

clearly show that they had escaped from the overwhelming deluge at

another point than the Caucasian and Altaic races; from which they had

perhaps been separated," he adds, "for a long time previous to the

occurrence of that event." For a season, geologists of high standing in

our own country, such as Buckland and Conybeare, followed Cuvier so far

as to hold, that the superficial deposits bore evidence everywhere of a

great cataclysm, the last of the geologic catastrophes; and which might

be identified, they believed, with the Noachian Deluge. Against this

view one of the most distinguished of Scottish naturalists, Dr. John

Fleming, raised a vigorous protest as early as the year 1826, and

conclusively showed that no temporary flood could have produced the

existing appearances. And so thoroughly were his facts and reasonings

confirmed by subsequent discovery, that the geologists of name who had

acquiesced, wholly or in part, in the Cuvierian view, read in succession

their recantations: Dr. Buckland in especial, who had written most

largely on the subject, and committed himself most thoroughly, did so a

very few years after: nor does the hypothesis of Cuvier appear to have

been since adopted by any writer of scientific reputation. Instead,

therefore, of contending with arguments or inferences which there are

now no parties in the field to maintain, I shall briefly refer to a few

of the leading characteristics of those superficial deposits on which

the abandoned conclusions were originally based, and show, in the

passing, that they are not such as a temporary deluge could have

produced.

The superficial deposits include what is known as the mammaliferous

crag, the drift, the boulder and brick clays, the stratified sands and

gravels, the travelled rocks, the ösars, and moraines of the _higher_

latitudes. For it is a fact very significant in its bearings on the

diluvial controversy, that it is in the higher latitudes in both

hemispheres that these peculiar deposits are chiefly to be found. They

have been traced in Patagonia in the one hemisphere, from the southern

limits of the country to the forty-first degree of south latitude; and

in Europe in the other, to the fortieth; and in America to even the

thirty-eighth degree of north latitude. But in the great belt, nearly

eighty degrees in breadth, which, encircling the globe from east to

west, includes with the torrid the warmer portions of the temperate

zones, they have scarce any existence at all, or exist at least in

different forms and exceedingly reduced proportions. The superficial

deposits, in their most characteristic conditions, are deposits of the

colder portions of the globe, and in many parts indicate that there

prevailed during their formation a much severer climate than now obtains

in the regions in which they occur. The shells which they contain in

Britain, for instance, though almost all of existing species, are many

of them such as are not now to be found in the British seas, but in seas

about ten degrees further to the north; and there is evidence that the

line of perpetual snow must have descended at the time to a lower level

than that attained by our second-class hills, and that almost every

Highland valley had its glacier. They represent, too, vast periods of

time;--earlier periods, during which the land gradually sank, till only

its higher eminences were uncovered, and great floats of icebergs went

careering over its submerged plains and lower hills; and later periods,

during which the land as gradually arose, after apparently many pauses

and oscillations, until at length, when it had reached a level scarce

eighty feet higher than that which it at present maintains, the climate

softened, and the glaciers which had formed in the later times among its

hills ultimately disappeared. Beds of sea-shells of the boreal type,

that belong to those ice ages, may be still found occupying the places

in which they had lived and died, many miles inland, and hundreds of

feet over the sea level. Boring shells, such as the pholodadidæ, may be

detected far out of sight of the ocean, still occupying the cells which

they had scooped out for themselves in hard limestone or yielding shale;

and serpula and nuliporate encrustations may be seen still adhering to

rocks raised to giddy elevations over the sea. The group of mammals,

however, which lived during this period, and to whose abundant tusks and

skeletons one of its older deposits (the mammaliferous crag) owes its

name, was marked by so peculiar a character, that evidence of a

universal deluge has been often sought for in their remains. The

group,--that which immediately preceded the animals of our own times,

and included not a few of the indigenous species which still inhabit our

country,--was chiefly remarkable for containing many genera, all of

whose existing species are exotic. It had its great elephant, its two

species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, and its

monkey; and much ingenious calculation has been employed by writers such

as Granville Penn, in attempting to show how these remains might have

been transported from the intertropical regions during the Flood, not

only to Britain, but even to the northern wastes of Siberia,--a voyage

of from four to five thousand miles. There are instances on record in

which the bodies of the drowned have been drifted from ninety to a

hundred and fifty miles from the spot where they had been first

submerged; but they have always been found, in these cases, in a

condition of sad mutilation and decay; whereas the carcass of the

ancient elephant which was discovered, a little ere the commencement of

the present century, locked up in ice in Siberia, three thousand six

hundred miles from where elephants now live, was in such a state of

excellent keeping, that the bears and dogs fed upon its flesh. It seems

a significant circumstance too, that the remains of these fossil

elephants, tigers, and hyænas, should be associated in even our own

country with those of well known northern species,--with the remains of

the reindeer, of the red deer, of the Lithuanian auroch, of the European

beaver, of the European wolf, of the wild cat, the fox, and the otter.

Writers, however, such as Mr. Penn, got over both difficulties. He

showed, for instance, how a ship had once run across the Atlantic under

bare poles, during an almost continued hurricane, at the rate of two

hundred and eighty-eight miles in twenty-four hours,--nearly the rate at

which the great American steamers cross the same ocean now; and why, he

asked, might not the carcasses of elephants have drifted northwards at

an equal rate on the tides of the deluge? And as for the mixed character

of the group with which these remains are found associated, _that_ was

exactly what Mr. Penn would have expected in the circumstances. It was

the result of a tumultuary flood, which had brought together in our

northern region the floating carcasses of the animals of all climates,

to sink in unwonted companionship, when putrefaction had done its work,

into the same deposits. He had, however, unluckily overlooked the fact,

that comparative anatomy is in reality a science; and further, that it

is a science of which men such as Cuvier and Owen know a great deal more

than the men who never studied it, however respectable. It is the

recorded decision of these great anatomists,--a decision which has been

many times tested and confirmed,--that the northern species of elephant,

rhinoceros, tiger, and hyæna, were entirely different from the

intertropical species; that they differed from them very considerably

more than the ass differs from the horse, or the dog from the wolf; and

that, while there is a preponderating amount of evidence to show that

they were natives of the countries in which their remains are now found,

there is not a shadow of evidence to show that they had ever lived, or

_could_ have lived, in an intertropical country. Of the northern

elephant, it is positively known, from the Siberian specimen, that

it was covered, like many other sub-arctic animals, with long

hair, and a thick crisp undergrowth of wool, about three inches in

length,--certainly not an intertropical provision; and so entirely

different was it in form from either of the existing species, African or

Indian, that a child could be taught in a single lesson to distinguish

it by the tusks alone. In fine, the assumption that challenges the

remains of the old Pleistocene carnivora and pachydermata as those of

intertropical species brought northwards by a universal deluge, is about

as well based and sound as if it challenged the bones of foxes

occasionally found in our woods for the remains of dogs of Aleppo or

Askalon brought into Britain by the Crusaders, or as if it pronounced a

dead ass to be one of the cavalry horses of the fatal charge of

Balaklava, transported to England from the Crimea as a relic of the

fight. The hypothesis confounds as a species the Rosinante of Quixote

with the Dapple of Sancho Panza, and frames its argument on the mistake.

That this extinct group of animals inhabited for ages the countries in

which their remains are now embedded, is rendered evident by their great

numbers in some localities, and from their occurrence in various states

of preservation, and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths

whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteen years by the oyster

dredgers of the Norfolk coast from a tract of submerged drift, could not

all have been contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have

represented several generations. And of course the two thousand

grinders brought up from the exposed surface of the drift must have

borne but a small proportion to the thousands still dispersed throughout

the entire depth of the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on the

mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, and which evaded

the important question of species, might be eluded, however unfairly, by

the assertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times

accumulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why

might not a universal flood have accumulated on this special tract of

drift, the carcasses of many elephants? But it will be found greatly

more difficult to elude the ingenious argument on the general question

of Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, one of the

most numerous animals of this ancient group was the great Irish elk,

_Megaceros Hibernicus_, a creature that, measured to the top of its

enormous antlers, stood ten feet four inches in height, and exceeded in

bulk and size the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer

family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns; "and a male

deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, "to have left about eight

pairs of antlers, besides its bones, to testify its former existence

upon the earth. But as the female has usually no antlers, our

expectations might be limited to the discovery of four times as many

pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the

countries in which such deer have lived and died. The actual proportion

of the fossil antlers of the great extinct species of British Pliocene

deer (which antlers are proved by the form of their base to have been

shed by the living animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is

somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, it

may be contended that the swollen carcass of a drowned exotic deer might

be borne along a diluvial wave to a considerable distance, and its

bones ultimately deposited far from its native soil, _it is not credible

that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried

by the same cause to the same distance_; or that any of them could be

rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty

torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of

the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland

have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the

fractured specimens are generally found in caves, and _show marks of the

teeth of the ossivorous hyænas_ by which they had been gnawed; thus at

the same time revealing the mode in which they were introduced into

those caves, and _proving the contemporaneous existence in this island

of both kinds of mammalia_."

[Illustration: Fig. 111.

MEGACEROS HIBERNICUS.

(_Irish Elk._)]

But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in large part of the

extinct mammals, ought of themselves to be decisive in this question. As

the opening of the Kirkdale cavern is only about four feet each way, a

diluvial wave, charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, could

scarce have washed into such an orifice any considerable number of the

intertropical animals. And yet there has been found in this cave,--with

the teeth of a very young mammoth, of a very great tiger, of a

tiger-like animal whose genus is extinct, of a rhinoceros, and of a

hippopotamus,--the fragmentary remains of from two to three hundred

hyænas. Further, even supposing, what is impossible, that a diluvial

wave had swept them all from the tropics into the four-feet hole, on

what principle is it to be explained that the bones thus washed into the

cave should be all gnawed bones, even those of the hyænas themselves,

whereas the bones of the same creatures found in the mammaliferous

deposits of the country bear no marks of teeth? Mr. Granville Penn,

however, gets over the difficulty of the cave, which is hollowed, I may

mention, in a limestone of the Oolitic series, inclosing the ammonite

and belemnite, by asserting that its mammaliferous contents may be

_somewhat older than itself_! The limestone existed, he holds, as but a

mere unformed pulp at the time the intertropical animals came floating

northwards: they sank into it; the gasses evolved during putrefaction

blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble,

somewhat as a glass-blower blows up a bottle; and hence the Kirkdale

cavern, with its gnawed bones and its amazing number of teeth. And

certainly a _geologic_ argument of this ingenious character has one

signal advantage,--it is in no danger whatever of being answered by the

geologists. Mr. Penn, in a second edition of his work, expressed some

surprise that an Edinburgh Reviewer should have merely stated his

_argument_ without replying to it!!

But I need not dwell on the arguments for a universal deluge which have

been derived from the superficial deposits. They all belong to an

immature age of geologic science, and are of no value whatever. Let us

pass rather to the consideration of the facts and arguments which

militate against the universality of the catastrophe.

The form and dimensions of Noah's ark are definitely given in the sacred

record. It seems to have been a great oblong box, somewhat like a wooden

granary, three stories high, and furnished with a roof apparently of the

ordinary angular shape, but with a somewhat broader ridge than common;

and it measured three hundred cubits in length, fifty cubits in breadth,

and thirty cubits in height. A good deal of controversy has, however,

arisen regarding the cubit employed; some holding, with Sir Walter

Raleigh, and most of the older theologians, such as Shuckford and Hales,

that the Noachian cubit was what is known as the common or natural

cubit, "containing," says Sir Walter, "one foot and a half, or a length

equal to that of the human fore-arm measured from the sharp of the elbow

to the point of the middle finger;" others contending that it was the

palm-cubit, "which taketh," adds my authority, "one handful more than

the common;" yet others, the royal or Persian cubit of twenty-one

inches; and so on; for there are, it seems, five several kinds of cubit

to choose from, all differing each from the others. The controversy is

one in which there is exceeding little footing for any party. I am

inclined, however, to adopt, with Raleigh and Hales, the _natural_

cubit, for the following reason. The given dimensions of the ark form

the oldest example of measurement of which we have any record; and all,

or almost all, the older and simpler standards of measure bear reference

to portions of the human frame. There is the span, the palm, the

hand-breadth, the thumb-breadth (or inch), the hair-breadth, and the

_foot_. The simple fisherman on our coasts still measures off his

fathoms by stretching out both his arms to the full; the village

sempstress still tells off her cloth-breadths by finger-lengths and

_nails_; the untaught tiller of the soil still estimates the area of his

little field by _pacing_ along its sides. Man's first and most obvious

expedient, when he sets himself to measure, is to employ his own person

as his standard; and the first or common cubit was a measure of this

natural description equal in length to the extended fore-arm and hand.

All the other cubits were artificial compounds of after introduction;

and so, in the absence of direct evidence on the point, I accept the

most natural and oldest cubit as in all probability the one employed in

the oldest recorded piece of cubit measurement. And the ark, if measured

by the common or natural cubit, must have been a vessel four hundred and

fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in breadth, and forty-five feet

in height. Dr. Kitto, however, though we find him remarking that in

computations of Scripture measures the cubit may be regarded as half a

yard (Sir Walter's estimate), adopts, in his own computation of the size

of the ark, without assigning any reason why, the palm-cubit, or cubit

of twenty-one inches and nearly nine lines (21.888 inches); and, waving

all controversy on the question, let us, for the argument's sake, admit

the larger measure. Let us,--however much inclined to hold with Raleigh,

Shuckford, and Hales,--agree with Dr. Kitto that the ark was five

hundred and forty-seven feet in length, by ninety-one feet in breadth.

Such dimensions, multiplied by three, the number of stories in the

vessel, would give an area equal to about one seventh that of the great

Crystal Palace of 1851. Or, to take a more definite illustration from

the same vast building, the area of the three floors of the ark, taken

together, would fall short by about twenty-eight thousand square feet of

that of the northern gallery of the Palace, which measured one thousand

eight hundred and forty-eight feet in length, by ninety-six feet in

breadth. And thus, yielding to our opponents their own large

measurements, let us now see whether the non-universality of the deluge

cannot be fairly predicated from the dimensions of the ark.

I may first remark, however, that measures so definite as those given by

Moses (definite, of course, if we waive the doubt regarding the cubit

employed) were effectual in setting the arithmeticians to work in all

ages of the Church, in order to determine whether all the animals in the

world, by sevens and by pairs, with food sufficient to serve them for a

twelvemonth, could have been accommodated in the given space. It was a

sort of stock problem, that required, it was thought, no very high

attainments to solve. Eighty years have not yet passed since kind old

Samuel Johnson, in writing to little Miss Thrale a nice little letter,

recommending her to be a good girl, and to mind her arithmetic, advised

her to try the ark problem. "If you can borrow 'Wilkins' Real

Character,'" we find him saying to the young lady, "a folio which

perhaps the booksellers can let you have, you will have a very curious

calculation, _which you are qualified to consider_, to show that Noah's

ark was capable of holding all the known animals of the world, with

provision for all the time in which the earth was under water."

Unluckily, however, though the dimensions of the ark were known, the

animals of the world were not; and so the question, in at least one of

its terms, had to be very frequently restated. Let us take it as we find

it presented (drawn, however, from a much older source), in Sir Walter

Raleigh's magnificent "History of the World." "If in a ship of such

greatness," says this distinguished man, "we seek room for eighty-nine

distinct species of beasts, or, lest any should be omitted, for a

hundred several kinds, we shall easily find place both for them and for

the birds, which in bigness are no way answerable to them, and for meat

to sustain them all. For there are three sorts of beasts whose bodies

are of a quantity well known; the beef, the sheep, and the wolf; to

which the rest may be reduced by saying, according to Aristotle, that

one elephant is equal to four beeves, one lion to two wolves, and so of

the rest. Of beasts, some feed on vegetables, others on flesh. There are

one-and-thirty kinds of the greater sort feeding on vegetables, of which

number only three are clean, according to the law of Moses, whereof

seven of a kind entered into the ark, namely, three couples for breed,

and one odd one for sacrifice; the other eight-and-twenty kinds were

'taken by two of each kind; so that in all there were in the ark

one-and-twenty great beasts clean, and six-and-fifty unclean; estimable

for largeness as ninety-one beeves; yet, for a supplement (lest,

perhaps, any species be omitted), lot them be valued as a hundred and

twenty beeves. Of the lesser sort feeding on vegetables were in the ark

six-and-twenty kinds, estimable, with good allowance for supply, as

fourscore sheep. Of those which devour flesh were two-and-thirty kinds,

answerable to threescore and four wolves. All these two hundred and

eighty beasts might be kept in one story or room of the ark, in their

several cabins; their meat in a second; the birds and their provision in

a third, with space to spare for Noah and his family, and all their

necessaries." Such was the calculation of the great voyager Raleigh,--a

man who had a more practical acquaintance with _stowage_ than perhaps

any of the other writers who have speculated on the capabilities of the

ark; and his estimate seems sober and judicious. It will be seen,

however, that from the vast increase in our knowledge of the mammals

which has taken place since the age in which the "History of the World"

was written, the calculation which embraced all the eighty-nine known

animals of that time would embrace those of but a single centre of

creation now; and that the estimate of Sir Walter tells, in consequence,

on the side, not of a universal, but of a partial deluge.

As man extended his acquaintance with the mammals, he found their number

greatly increasing on his hands. Button, like Raleigh, though a

professed naturalist, and a writer of admirable genius, had no very

distinct notions of species. He was inclined to question whether even

the ass might not be merely a degraded horse; and confounded many of the

mammals of the New World with their representative congeners in the Old.

And yet, in summing up his history of the mammaliferous division, he

could state, that though it included descriptions of "a hundred and

thirty-four different species of creatures that suckled their young,

many of which had not been observed or described before," it was

necessarily incomplete, as there were still others to add to the list,

for whose history there existed no materials. At the same time he

remarked, however, that the "number of quadruped animals whose existence

is certain and well established does not amount to more than two

hundred on the surface of the known world." Yet here was the extreme

estimate made by Raleigh, with what he deemed large allowance for the

unknown animals, fairly doubled; and under the hands of more

discriminating naturalists, and in the inevitable course of discovery,

the number has so enormously increased, that the "eighty-nine distinct

species" known to the great voyager have been represented during the

last thirty years by the one thousand mammals of Swainson's estimate,

the one thousand one hundred and forty-nine mammals of Charles

Bonaparte's estimate, the one thousand two hundred and thirty mammals of

Winding's estimate, and the one thousand five hundred mammals of Oken's

estimate. In the first edition of the admirable "Physical Atlas" of

Johnston (published in 1848) there are one thousand six hundred and

twenty-six different species of mammals enumerated; and in the second

edition (published in 1856), one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight

species. And to this very extraordinary advance on the eighty-nine

mammals of Raleigh, and the two hundred mammals of Buffon, we must add

the six thousand two hundred and sixty-six birds of Lesson, and the six

hundred and fifty-seven reptiles of Charles Bonaparte; or at

least,--subtracting the sea snakes, and perhaps the turtles, as fitted

to live outside the ark,--his six hundred and _forty-two_ reptiles.[29]

Such is the number of the known vertebrates, exclusive of the fishes,

with which in this question we have now to deal. Still, however, there

are a few lingering theologians, some of them very intelligent men, who

continue to regard the ark as quite big enough for them all. Dr.

Hamilton of Mobile, for instance, after fairly stating Swainson's

estimate, namely, one thousand mammalia, six thousand birds, and one

thousand five hundred reptiles and amphibiæ, goes on to say, that "it

must not be forgotten, that of all these, the vastly greater proportion

are small; and that numbers of them could be placed together in the same

compartment of the ark." This, however, permit me to say with all

respect, is not meeting the real difficulty. No doubt many of the birds

are small,--many of the reptiles are small,--many even of the mammals

are small,--many small animals were known in the days of Raleigh, and

a much greater number of small animals are known now; but the question

proper to the case seems to be, What proportions do both the large

and the small animals now known bear to the large and small animals

known in the days of Raleigh or Buffon; and how much additional

accommodation-room would they require during their supposed voyage of a

twelvemonth? There are two different ways in which the list of the

known animals has been increased, especially of the known mammals. They

have been increased in a certain appreciable proportion by _discovery_;

and as discovery has been made chiefly in islands,--for the great

continents had been previously known,--and as the mammals of islands, as

has been well remarked by Cuvier, are usually small, of this appreciable

proportion the bulk is comparatively not great. The great kangaroo

(_Macropus giganteus_), though the inhabitant of an island which ranks

among the continents, would not much exceed in bulk, tried by Raleigh's

quaint scale of measurement, a sheep and a half, or at most two sheep;

and yet I know not that discovery in the islands has added a larger

animal to the previously known ones than the great kangaroo. Mr.

Waterhouse, when he published, in 1841, his "History of the

Marsupialia," reckoned up one hundred and five distinct species of

pouched animals; and eighteen species more,--in all one hundred and

twenty-three,--have been since added to the order. With the exception of

an opossum or two, all these marsupiata may be regarded as discoveries

made since the time of Buffon; most of them, as I have said, are small.

And such, generally, has been the nature of the revelations made during

the last seventy years by positive _discovery_. It is not, however, by

discovery, but by scientific scrutiny into the true nature and

distinctions of species, that the recent enormous increase in the number

of the known mammals has mainly taken place. And in these cases it will

generally be found that the new species, which had been previously

confounded with some old ones, so nearly resemble the latter in bulk, as

well as aspect, as to justify in some degree the mistake. Let us take

two of the greatest animals as examples,--the elephant and the

rhinoceros. Buffon confounded the African with the Asiatic elephant. We

now know that they represent two well marked species, _Elephas

Africanus_ and _Elephas Indicus_; and that an ark which contained the

ancestors of all the existing animals would require to have its _two_

pair of elephants, not the one pair only which would have been deemed

sufficient eighty years ago. Again, with respect to the rhinoceros,

Buffon was acquainted with the single horned animal, and had _heard_ of

the animal with two horns; and so, though by no means certain that the

"_variety_ was constant," he yet held that "two distinct species might

possibly be established." But we now know that there are six species of

rhinoceros (seven, according to the "Physical Atlas,")--_Rh. Indicus_,

_Rh. Javanus_, _Rh. Sumatrensis_, _Rh. Africanus_, _Rh. simus_, and _Rh.

ketloa_; and that, instead of _possibly_ four, at least twelve, or more

probably fourteen, animals of the genus would require, on the hypothesis

of a universal deluge, to have been accommodated in the ark. Buffon even

held that the bison of America might be identical with not simply the

auroch of Europe, which it closely resembles, but with even the European

ox, which it does _not_ resemble. But it is now known, that while the

European aurochs are provided by nature with but fourteen pairs of ribs,

the American bison is furnished with fifteen. Of each of the ruminants

that divide the hoof, there were _seven_ introduced into the ark; and it

may be well to mark how, even during the last few years, our

acquaintance with this order of animals has been growing, and how

greatly the known species, in their relation to human knowledge, have in

consequence increased. In 1848 (in the first edition of the "Physical

Atlas") Mr. Waterhouse estimated the oxen at thirteen species; in 1856

(in the second edition) he estimates them at twenty. In 1848 he

estimated the sheep at twenty-one species; in 1856 he estimates them at

twenty-seven. In 1848 he estimated the goats at fourteen species; in

1856 he estimates them at twenty. In 1846 he estimated the deer at

thirty-eight species; in 1856 he estimates them at fifty-one. In short,

if, excluding the lamas and the musks as doubtfully _clean_, tried by

the Mosaic test, we but add to the sheep, goats, deer, and cattle, the

forty-eight species of unequivocally _clean_ antelopes, and multiply the

whole by seven, we shall have as the result a sum total of one thousand

one hundred and sixty-two individuals,--a number more than four times

greater than that for which Raleigh made provision in the ark, and

considerably more than twice greater than that provided for by the

students of Buffon. Such is the nature and amount of the increase which

has taken place during the last half century in the mammaliferous fauna.

In so great a majority of cases has it increased its _bulk_ in the ratio

in which it has increased its numbers, that if one ark was not deemed

more than sufficient to accommodate the animal world known to the French

naturalist of eighty years ago, it would require at least from five to

six arks to accommodate the animal world known in the present day.

Even in the days of Buffon, however, and at a still earlier period, the

ark, regarded as a natural means of preservation from death by

_drowning_, was usually coupled, in the case of at least the carnivorous

animals, with certain miraculous provisions against death by _starving_.

It seems to have been generally taken for granted, that the flesh-eating

animals, when introduced to the shelter of the ark, entirely changed the

nature indicated by their form of teeth, the character of their

stomachs, and the shortness of their bowels, and fed, for the time they

remained in it, exclusively on vegetable substances, which, in ordinary

circumstances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle.

Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, which refer

to a class of wild animals whose real destiny is rather, it would seem,

to be extirpated than to be changed, coupled with the belief, now no

longer tenable, that there was a time, ere man had sinned, when there

was no death among the inferior creatures, and of course no eaters of

flesh, rendered the belief easy of reception; but it involved a miracle

nowhere recorded; and the burden of the proof that such a miracle

actually took place in the circumstances lies of necessity on the

assertors of a universal deluge. Further, of even the creatures that

live on vegetables, many are restricted in their food to single plants,

which are themselves restricted to limited localities and remote regions

of the globe. Dr. Hamilton has not referred, in his list of animals, to

the insects,--a class which, though they were estimated in 1842 to

consist of no fewer than five hundred and fifty thousand species, might

yet be accommodated in a comparatively limited space. But how

extraordinary an amount of miracle would it not require to bring them

all together into any one centre, or to preserve them there! Many of

them, like the myriapoda and the thysanura, have no wings, and but

feeble locomotive powers; many of them, such as the ephemera and the

male ants, live after they have got their wings only a few hours, or at

most a few days; and there are myriads of them that can live upon but

single plants that grow in very limited botanic centres. Even supposing

them all brought into the ark by miracle as eggs, what multitudes of

them would not, without the exertion of further miracle, require to be

sent back to their proper habitats as wingless grubs, or as insects

restricted by nature to a few days of life! Or, supposing the eggs all

left in their several localities to lie under water for a twelvemonth

amid mud and debris,--though certain of the hardier kinds might survive

such treatment, by miracle alone could the preponderating majority of

the class be preserved. And be it remembered, that the expedient of

having recourse to supposititious miracle in order to get over a

difficulty insurmountable on every natural principle, is not of the

nature of argument, but simply an evidence of the want of it. Argument

is at an end when supposititious miracle is introduced.

But the very inadequate size of the ark, though a conclusive proof that

all, or nearly all, the progenitors of our existing animals could not

have harbored within it from any general cataclysm, does not furnish a

stronger argument against the possibility of any such assemblage, than

the peculiar manner in which we now find these animals distributed over

the earth's surface. Linnæus held, early in the last century, that all

creatures which now inhabit the globe had proceeded originally from some

such common centre as the ark might have furnished; but no zoologist

acquainted with the distribution of species can acquiesce in any such

conclusion now. We now know that every great continent has its own

peculiar fauna; that the original centres of distribution must have

been, not one, but many; further, that the areas or circles around these

centres must have been occupied by their pristine animals in ages long

anterior to that of the Noachian Deluge; nay, that in even the latter

geologic ages, they were preceded in them by animals of the same general

type. There are fourteen such areas or provinces enumerated by the later

naturalists. It may be well, however, instead of running any risk of

losing ourselves amid the less nicely defined provinces of the Old

World, to draw our illustrations from two and a half provinces of later

discovery, whose limits have been rigidly fixed by nature. "The great

continents," says Cuvier, "contain species peculiar to each; insomuch

that whenever large countries of this description have been discovered,

which their situation had kept isolated from the rest of the world, the

class of quadrupeds which they contained has been found extremely

different from any that had existed elsewhere. Thus, when the Spaniards

first penetrated into South America, they did not find a single species

of quadruped the same as any of Europe, Asia, or Africa. The puma, the

jaguar, the tapir, the cabiai, the lama, the vicuna, the sloths, the

armadilloes, the opossums, and the whole tribe of sapajous, were to them

entirely new animals, of which they had no idea. Similar circumstances

have recurred in our own time, when the coasts of New Holland and the

adjacent islands were first explored. The various species of kangaroo,

phascolomys, dasyurus, and perameles, the flying phalangers, the

ornithorynchi, and echidnæ, have astonished naturalists by the

strangeness of their conformations, which presented proportions contrary

to all former rules, and were incapable of being arranged under any of

the systems then in use." New Zealand, though singularly devoid of

indigenous mammals and reptiles,--for the only native mammal seems to be

a peculiar species of rat, and the only native reptile a small, harmless

lizard,--has a scarce less remarkable fauna than either of these great

continents. It consists almost exclusively of birds, some of them so ill

provided with wings, that, like the _wika_ of the natives, they can only

run along the ground. And it is a most significant fact, that both in

the two great continents and the New Zealand islands there existed, in

the later geologic ages, extinct faunas that bore the peculiar generic

characters by which their recent ones are still distinguished. The

sloths and armadilloes of South America had their gigantic predecessors

in the enormous megatherium and mylodon, and the strongly armed

glyptodon; the kangaroos and wombats of Australia had their extinct

predecessors in a kangaroo nearly twice the size of the largest living

species, and in so huge a wombat, that its bones have been mistaken for

those of the hippopotamus; and the ornithic inhabitants of New Zealand

had their predecessors in the monstrous birds, such as the dinornis, the

aptornis, and the palapteryx,--wingless creatures like the ostrich,

that stood from six to twelve feet in height. In these several regions

two _generations_ of species of the genera peculiar to them have

existed,--the recent generation by whose descendants they are still

inhabited, and the extinct gigantic generation, whose remains we find

locked up in their soils and caves. But how are such facts reconcileable

with the hypothesis of a universal deluge?

[Illustration: Fig. 112.

MYLODON ROBUSTUS.]

[Illustration: Fig. 113.

GLYPTODON CLAVIPES.]

The deluge was an event of the existing creation. Had it been universal,

it would either have broken up all the diverse centres, and substituted

one great general centre instead,--that in which the ark rested; or

else, at an enormous expense of miracle, all the animals preserved by

_natural_ means by Noah would have had to be returned by _supernatural_

means to the regions whence by means _equally supernatural_ they had

been brought. The sloths and armadilloes,--little fitted by nature for

long journeys,--would have required to be ferried across the Atlantic to

the regions in which the remains of the megatherium and glyptodon lie

entombed; the kangaroo and wombat, to the insulated continent that

contains the bones of the extinct macropus and phalcolomys; and the New

Zealand birds, including its heavy flying quails and its wingless

wood-hen, to those remote islands of the Pacific in which the skeletons

of _Palapteryx ingens_ and _Dinornus giganteus_ lie entombed. Nor will

it avail aught to urge, with certain assertors of a universal deluge,

that during the cataclysm, sea and land changed their places, and that

what is now land had formed the bottom of the antediluvian ocean, and,

_vice versa_, what is now sea had been the land on which the first human

inhabitants of the earth increased and multiplied. No geologist who

knows how very various the ages of the several table-lands and mountain

chains in reality are could acquiesce in such an hypothesis; our own

Scottish shores,--if to the term of the existing we add that of the

ancient coast line,--must have formed the limits of the land from a time

vastly more remote than the age of the deluge. But even supposing, for

the argument's sake, the hypothesis recognized as admissible, what, in

the circumstances of the case, would be gained by the admission? A

continuous tract of land would have stretched,--when all the oceans were

continents and all the continents oceans,--between the South American

and the Asiatic coasts. And it is just possible that, during the hundred

and twenty years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths

might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, from where the

skeletons of the great megatheria are buried, to where the great vessel

stood. But after the Flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land

had taken place, there would remain for them no longer a roadway; and

so, though their journey outwards might, in all save the impulse which

led to it, have been altogether a natural one, their voyage homewards

could not be other than miraculous. Nor would the exertion of miracle

have had to be restricted to the transport of the _remoter_ travellers.

How, we may well ask, had the Flood been universal, could even such

islands as Great Britain and Ireland have ever been replenished with

many of their original inhabitants? Even supposing it possible that

animals, such as the red deer and the native ox _might_ have swam across

the Straits of Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits

in which the bones and horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed

long ages before, the feat would have been surely far beyond the power

of such feeble natives of the soil as the mole, the hedgehog, the shrew,

the dormouse, and the field-vole.

Dr. Pye Smith, in dealing with this subject, has emphatically said, that

"all land animals having their geographical regions, to which their

constitutional natures are congenial,--many of them being unable to

live in any other situation,--we cannot represent to ourselves the idea

of their being brought into one small spot from the polar regions, the

torrid zone, and all the other climates of Asia, Africa, Europe, and

America, Australia, and the thousands of islands,--their preservation

and provision, and the final disposal of them,--without bringing up the

idea of miracles more stupendous than any that are recorded in

Scripture. The great decisive miracle of Christianity," he adds,--"the

resurrection of the Lord Jesus,--sinks down before it." And let us

remember that the preservation and redistribution of the land animals

would demand but a portion of the amount of miracle absolutely necessary

for the preservation, in the circumstances, of the entire fauna of the

globe. The fresh water fishes, molluscs, crustacea, and zoophytes, could

be kept alive in a universal deluge only by miraculous means. It has

been urged that, though the living individuals were to perish, their

spawn might be preserved by natural means. It must be remembered,

however, that even of some fishes whose proper habitat is the sea, such

as the salmon, it is essential for the maintenance of the species that

the spawn should be deposited in fresh water, nay, in running fresh

water; for in still water, however pure, the eggs in a few weeks addle

and die. The eggs of the common trout also require to be deposited in

running fresh water; while other fresh water fishes, such as the tench

and carp, are reared most successfully in still, reedy ponds. The fresh

water fishes spawn, too, at very different seasons, and the young remain

for very different periods in the egg. The perch and grayling spawn in

the end of April or the beginning of May; the tench and roach about the

middle of June; the common trout and powan in October and November. And

while some fishes, such as the salmon, remain from ninety to a hundred

days in the egg, others, such as the trout, are extruded in five weeks.

Without special miracle the spawn of all the fresh water fishes could

not be in existence _as such_ at one and the same time; without special

miracle it could not maintain its vitality in a universal deluge; and

without special miracle, even did it maintain its vitality, it could not

remain in the egg state throughout an entire twelvemonth, but would be

developed into fishes of the several species to which it belonged at

very different periods. Further, in a universal deluge, without special

miracle vast numbers of even the salt water animals could not fail to be

extirpated; in particular, almost all the molluscs of the littoral and

laminarian zones. Nor would the vegetable kingdom fare greatly better

than the animal one. Of the one hundred thousand species of known

plants, few indeed would survive submersion for a twelvemonth; nor would

the seeds of most of the others fare better than the plants themselves.

There are certain hardy seeds that in favorable circumstances maintain

their vitality for ages; and there are others, strongly encased in

water-tight shells or skins, that have floated across oceans to

germinate in distant islands; but such, as every florist knows, is not

the general character of seeds; and not until after many unsuccessful

attempts, and many expedients had been resorted to, have the more

delicate kinds been brought uninjured, even on shipboard, from distant

countries to our own. It is not too much to hold that, without special

miracle, at least three fourths of the terrestrial vegetation of the

globe would have perished in a universal deluge that covered over the

dry land for a year. Assuredly the various vegetable centres or

regions,--estimated by Schouw at twenty-five,--bear witness to no such

catastrophe. Still distinct and unbroken, as of old, either no effacing

flood has passed over them, or they were shielded from its effects at an

expense of miracle many times more considerable than that at which the

Jews were brought out of Egypt and preserved amid the nations, or

Christianity itself was ultimately established.[30]

There is, however, a class of learned and thoroughly respectable

theologians who seem disposed to accept rather of any amount of

unrecorded miracle, than to admit of a merely partial deluge,

coextensive with but the human family. "Were the difficulty attending

this subject tenfold greater, and seemingly beyond all satisfactory

explanation," says Dr. William Hamilton, "if I yet find it recorded in

the Book of Revelation, that in the deluge '_every living thing in which

is the breath of life perished, and Noah only remained alive, and they

which were with him in the ark_,' I could still believe it implicitly,

satisfied that the difficulty of explanation springs solely from the

imperfection of human knowledge, and not from any limitation in the

power or the wisdom of God, nor yet from any lack of trustworthiness in

the document given us in a revelation from God,--a document given to men

by the hands of Moses, the learned, accomplished, and eminently devout

Jewish legislator." Here again, however, Dr. Hamilton seems to have

mistaken the question actually at issue. The true question is, not

whether or no Moses is to be believed in the matter, but whether or no

we in reality understand Moses. The question is, whether we are to

regard the passages in which he describes the Flood as universal, as

belonging to the very numerous metonymic texts of Scripture in which a

part--sometimes a not very large part--is described as the whole, or to

regard them as strictly and severely literal. Or, in other words,

whether we are, with learned and solid divines of the olden time, such

as Poole and Stillingfleet, and with many ingenious and accomplished

divines of the passing age, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith and the Rev.

Professor Hitchcock, to regard these passages as merely metonymic; or,

with Drs. Hamilton and Kitto, to regard them as strictly literal, and to

call up in support of the literal reading an amount of supposititious

miracle, compared with which all the recorded miracles of the Old and

New Testaments sink into insignificance. The controversy does not lie

between Moses and the naturalists, but between the _readings_ of

theologians such as Matthew Poole and Stillingfleet on the one hand, and

the _readings_ of theologians such as Drs. Hamilton and Kitto on the

other. And finding all natural science arrayed against the conclusions

of the one class, and in favor of those of the other, and believing,

further, that there has been always such a marked economy shown in the

exercise of miraculous powers, that there has never been more of miracle

employed in any one of the dispensations than was needed,[31] I must

hold that the theologians who believe that the deluge was but

coextensive with the moral purpose which it served are more in the

right, and may be more safely followed, than the theologians who hold

that it extended greatly further than was necessary. It is not with

Moses or the truth of revelation that our controversy lies, but with the

opponents of Stillingfleet and of Poole.

To only one of the other arguments employed in this controversy need I

at all refer. The cones of volcanic craters are formed of loose

incoherent scoriæ and ashes, and, when exposed, as in the case of

submarine volcanoes, such as Graham's Island and the islands of Nyoe and

Sabrina, to the denuding force of waves and currents, they have in a few

weeks, or at most a few months, been washed completely away. And yet in

various parts of the world, such as Auvergne in central France, and

along the flanks of Ætna, there are cones of long extinct or long

slumbering volcanoes, which, though of at least triple the antiquity of

the Noachian deluge, and though composed of the ordinary incoherent

materials, exhibit no marks of denudation. According to the calculations

of Sir Charles Lyell, no devastating flood could have passed over the

forest zone of Ætna during the last twelve thousand years,--for such is

the antiquity which he assigns to its older lateral cones, that retain

in integrity their original shape; and the volcanic cones of Auvergne,

which inclose in their ashes the remains of extinct animals, and present

an outline as perfect as those of Ætna, are deemed older still. Graham

Island arose out of the sea early in July, 1831; in the beginning of the

following August it had attained to a circumference of three miles, and

to a height of two hundred feet; and yet in less than three months from

that time the waves had washed its immense mass down to the sea level;

and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dangerous shoal. And such

inevitably would have been the fate of the equally incoherent cone-like

craters of Ætna and Auvergne during the seven and a half months that

intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep

and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, had they been included within

the area of the deluge. It is estimated that even the newer Auvergne

lavas are as old as the times of the Miocene. It is at least a

demonstrable fact, that the slow action of streams had hollowed them in

several places into deep chasms nearly two thousand years ago; for the

remains of Roman works of about that age survive, to show that they had

then, as now, to be spanned over by bridges, and that baths had been

erected in their denuded recesses; and yet the craters out of which

these lavas had flowed retain well nigh all their original sharpness of

outline. No wave ever dashed against their symmetrically sloping sides.

Now, I have in no instance seen the argument derivable from this class

of facts fairly met. The supposed mistake of the Canonico Recupero, or

rather of Brydone, who argued that the "lowest of a series of seven

distinct lavas of Ætna, most of them covered by thick intervening beds

of rich earth, must have been fourteen thousand years old," has been

often referred to in the controversy. Brydone or the Canon mistook, it

has been said, beds of brown ashes, each of which might have been

deposited during a single shower, for beds of rich earth, each of which

would have taken centuries to form. The oldest of the series of lava

beds, therefore, instead of being fourteen thousand, might be scarce

fourteen hundred years old. And if Brydone or the Canon were thus

mistaken in their calculations, why may not the modern geologists be

also mistaken in theirs? Now, altogether waiving the question as to

whether the ingenious traveller of eighty-six years ago was or was not

mistaken in his estimate,--for to those acquainted with geologic fact in

general, or more particularly with the elaborate descriptions of Ætna

given during the last thirty years by Elie de Beaumont, Hoffmann, and

Sir Charles Lyell, the facts of Brydone, in their bearing on either the

age of the earth or the age of the mountain, can well be

spared,--waiving, I say, the question whether the traveller was in

reality in mistake, I must be permitted to remark, that the concurrent

testimony of geologists cannot in fairness be placed on the same level

as the testimony of a man who, though accomplished and intelligent, was

not only no geologist, but who observed and described ere geology had

any existence as a science. Further, I must be allowed to add, that

geology _is_ now a science; and that individuals unacquainted with it in

its character as such place themselves in positions greatly more

perilous than they seem to think, when they enter on the field of

argument with men who for many years have made it a subject of special

study. It is not by "bidding down" the age of the extinct or quiescent

volcanoes by a species of blind haggling, or by presuming mistake in the

calculations regarding them, simply because mistakes are possible and

have sometimes been made, that that portion of the cumulative evidence

against a universal deluge which they furnish is to be neutralized or

set aside. The argument on the general question _is_ a cumulative one;

and while many of its component portions are of themselves so

conclusive, that only supposititious miracle, and not presentable

argument, can be arrayed against them, its aggregate force seems wholly

irresistible. In passing, however, from the facts and reasonings that

bear against the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to indicate in a few

sentences both the possible mode in which a merely partial flood might

have taken place, and the probable extent of area which it covered, I

shall have to remove from very strong to comparatively weak

ground,--from what can be maintained as argument, to what can at best be

but offered as conjecture.

There is a remarkable portion of the globe, chiefly in the Asiatic

continent, though it extends into Europe, and which is nearly equal to

all Europe in area, whose rivers (some of them, such as the Volga, the

Oural, the Sihon, the Kour, and the Amoo, of great size) do not fall

into the ocean, or into any of the many seas which communicate with it.

They are, on the contrary, all _turned inwards_, if I may so express

myself; losing themselves, in the eastern parts of the tract, in the

lakes of a rainless district, in which they supply but the waste of

evaporation, and falling, in the western parts, into seas such as the

Caspian and the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still

under the level of the ocean. The shore line of the Caspian, for

instance, is rather more than eighty-three feet beneath that of the

Black Sea; and some of the great flat steppes which spread out around

it, such as what is known as the Steppe of Astracan, have a mean level

of about thirty feet beneath that of the Baltic. Were there a

trench-like strip of country that communicated between the Caspian and

the Gulf of Finland to be depressed beneath the level of the latter sea,

it would _so open up the fountains of the great deep_ as to lay under

water an extensive and populous region, containing the cities of

Astracan and Astrabad, and many other towns and villages. Nor is it

unworthy of remark, surely, that one of the depressed steppes of this

peculiar region is known as the "Low Steppe of the Caucasus," and forms

no inconsiderable portion of the great recognized centre of the human

family. The Mount Ararat on which, according to many of our

commentators, the ark rested, rises immediately on the western edge of

this great hollow; the Mount Ararat selected as the scene of that event

by Sir Walter Raleigh, certainly not without some show of reason, lies

far within it. Vast plains, white with salt, and charged with sea

shells, show that the Caspian Sea was at no distant period greatly more

extensive than it is now. In an outer region, which includes the vast

desert of Khiva, shells also abound; but they seem to belong, as a

group, rather to some of the later Tertiary eras than to the recent

period. It is quite possible, however, that,--as on parts of the western

shores of our own country, where recent marine deposits lie over marine

deposits of the Pleistocene age, while a terrestrial deposit,

representative of an intervening paroxysm of upheaval, lies between,--it

is possible, I say, that in this great depressed area, the region

covered of old by a Tertiary sea, which we know united the Sea of Aral

with the Caspian, and rolled over many a wide steppe and vast plain, may

have been again covered for a brief period (after ages of upheaval) by

the breaking in of the great deep during that season of judgment when,

with the exception of one family, the whole human race was destroyed. It

seems confirmatory of this view, that during even the historic period,

at least one of the neighboring inland seas, though it belongs to a

different system from that of the Caspian and the Aral, covered a vastly

greater area than it does now,--a consequence, apparently, of a more

considerable depression in the Caucasian region than at present exists.

Herodotus, as quoted by Cuvier in his "Theory of the Earth," represents

the Sea of Azoff as equal in extent to the Euxine.

With the known facts, then, regarding this depressed Asiatic region

before us, let us see whether we cannot originate a theory of the

Deluge free from at least the palpable monstrosities of the older ones.

Let us suppose that the human family, still amounting to several

millions, though greatly reduced by exterminating wars and exhausting

vices, were congregated in that tract of country which, extending

eastwards from the modern Ararat to far beyond the Sea of Aral, includes

the original Caucasian centre of the race: let us suppose that, the hour

of judgment having at length arrived, the land began gradually to sink,

as the tract in the run of Cutch sank in the year 1819, or as the tract

in the southern part of North America, known as the "sunk country," sank

in the year 1821: further, let us suppose that the depression took place

slowly and equably for forty days together, at the rate of about four

hundred feet per day,--a rate not twice greater than that at which the

tide rises in the Straits of Magellan, and which would have rendered

itself apparent as but a persistent inward flowing of the sea: let us

yet further suppose, that from mayhap some volcanic outburst coincident

with the depression, and an effect of the same deep seated cause, the

atmosphere was so affected, that heavy drenching rains continued to

descend during the whole time, and that, though they could contribute

but little to the actual volume of the flood,--at most only some five or

six inches per day,--they at least _seemed_ to constitute one of its

main causes, and added greatly to its terrors, by swelling the rivers,

and rushing downwards in torrents from the hills. The depression, which,

by extending to the Euxine Sea and the Persian Gulf on the one hand, and

to the Gulf of Finland on the other, would open up by three separate

channels the fountains of the great deep, and which included, let us

suppose, an area of about two thousand miles each way, would, at the end

of the fortieth day, be sunk in its centre to the depth of sixteen

thousand feet,--a depth sufficiently profound to bury the loftiest

mountains of the district; and yet, having a gradient of declination of

but sixteen feet per mile, the contour of its hills and plains would

remain apparently what they had been before,--the doomed inhabitants

would see but the water rising along the mountain sides, and one refuge

after another swept away, till the last witness of the scene would have

perished, and the last hill-top would have disappeared. And when, after

a hundred and fifty days had come and gone, the depressed hollow would

have begun slowly to rise,--and when, after the fifth month had passed,

the ark would have grounded on the summit of Mount Ararat,--all that

could have been seen from the upper window of the vessel would be simply

a boundless sea, roughened by tides, now flowing outwards, with a

reversed course, towards the distant ocean, by the three great outlets

which, during the period of depression, had given access to the waters.

Noah would of course see that "the fountains of the deep were stopped,"

and "the waters returning from off the earth continually;" but whether

the Deluge had been partial or universal, he could neither see nor know.

His prospect in either case would have been equally that described by

the poet Bowles:--

"The mighty ark

Rests upon Ararat; but nought around

Its inmates can behold, save o'er the expanse

Of boundless waters the sun's orient orb

Stretching the hull's long shadow, or the moon

In silence through the silver-curtained clouds

Sailing, as she herself were lost and left

In hollow loneliness."

Let me further remark, that in one important sense a partial Flood, such

as the one of which I have conceived as adequate to the destruction, in

an early age, of the whole human family, could scarce be regarded as

miraculous. Several of our first geologists hold, that some of the

formidable cataclysms of the remote past may have been occasioned by the

sudden upheaval of vast continents, which, by displacing great bodies of

water, and rolling them outwards in the character of enormous waves,

inundated wide regions elevated hundreds of feet over the sea level, and

strewed them over with the rock boulders, clays, gravels, and organic

debris of deep sea bottoms. And these cataclysms they regard as

perfectly natural, though of course very unusual, events. Nor would the

gradual depression of a continent, or, as in the supposed case, of a

portion of a continent, be in any degree less natural than the sudden

upheaval of a continent. It would, on the contrary, be much more

according to experience. Nay, were such a depression and elevation of

the great Asiatic basin to take place during the coming twelvemonth as

that of which I have conceived as the probable cause of the Deluge,

though the geologists would have to describe it as beyond comparison the

most remarkable oscillation of level which had taken place within the

historic period, they would certainly regard it as no more miraculous

than the great earthquake of Lisbon, or than that exhibition of the

volcanic forces which elevated the mountain of Jorullo in a single night

sixteen hundred feet over the plain. And why have recourse, in

speculating on the real event of four thousand years ago, to

supposititious miracle, if an event of apparently the same kind would

not be regarded as miraculous now? May we not in this matter take our

stand beside the poet, who, when recognizing a Providence in the great

Calabrian earthquake, and in the overwhelming wave by which it was

accompanied, pertinently inquired of the skeptics,--

"Has not God

Still wrought by means since first he made the world?

_And did he not of old employ his means

To drown it?_ What is his creation less

Than a capacious reservoir of means,

Formed for his use, and ready at his will?"

The revelation to Noah, which warned him of a coming Flood, and taught

him how to prepare for it, was evidently miraculous: the Flood itself

may have been purely providential. But on this part of the subject I

need not dwell. I have accomplished my purpose if I have shown, as was

attempted of old by divines such as Stillingfleet and Poole, that there

"seems to be no reason why the Deluge should be extended beyond the

occasion of it, which was the corruption of man," but, on the contrary,

much reason against it; and that, on the other hand, a Flood restricted

and partial, and yet sufficient to destroy the race in an early age,

while still congregating in their original centre, cannot be regarded as

by any means an incredible event. The incredibility lies in the mere

human glosses and misinterpretations in which its history has been

enveloped. Divested of these, and viewed in its connection with those

wonderful traditions which still float all over the world regarding it,

it forms, not one of the stumbling-blocks, but one of the evidences, of

our faith; and renders the exercise a not unprofitable one, when,

according to the poet,--

"Back through the dusk

Of ages Contemplation turns her view,

To mark, as from its infancy, the world

Peopled again from that mysterious shrine

That rested on the top of Ararat."

LECTURE NINTH.

THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED.

It seems natural, nay, inevitable, that false revelations, which have

descended from remote, unscientific ages, should be committed to a false

science. Natural phenomena, when of an extraordinary character,

powerfully impress the untutored mind. In operating, through the

curiosity or the fears of men, upon that instinct of humanity--never

wholly inactive in even the rudest state--which cannot witness any

remarkable effect without seeking to connect it with its producing

cause, they excite into activity in the search the imaginative

faculty,--always of earlier development than the judgment in both

peoples and individuals, and which never fails, when so employed, to

conduct to delusions and extravagances. And this state of mind gives

birth simultaneously to both false religion and false science. Great

tempests, inundations, eclipses, earthquakes, thunder and lightning,

famine and pestilence, the births of monsters, or the rare visitation of

strange fishes or wild animals, come all to be included in the

mythologic domain. Even the untutored Indian "sees God in clouds, and

hears him in the wind." And when an order of priesthood springs up, a

portion of the leisure of the class is usually employed in speculating

on these phenomena; and to their speculations they give the form of

direct revelation. Thus almost all the false religions of the old

world--not grafted, like Mohammedanism, on the true one--have their

pretended revelations regarding the form, structure, and origin of the

earth, the mechanism of the heavens, the electric and meteoric

phenomena, and even the arrangement of oceans and continents on the

surface of our planet.

The old extinct forms of heathenism,--Etrurian, Egyptian, Phoenician,

and Babylonian,--had all their cosmogonies.[32] In the wild mythology of

ancient Scandinavia, of which we find such distinct traces in the

languages and superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our

own country continues to give the names of its uncouth deities to the

days of our week, there is a strange genesis of not only the heavens and

earth, but of the gods also. It has, besides, its scheme of the universe

in its great mundane tree of three vast roots,--celestial, terrestrial,

and infernal,--which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all

things. The leading religions of the East which still survive, such as

Buddhism, Brahminism, and Parseeism, have all their astronomy,

geography, meteorology, and geology, existing as component parts of

their several systems. Nor have there been wanting ingenious men who,

though little tolerant of the various attempts made to reconcile the

Mosaic account of creation with the discoveries of modern science, have

looked with a favorable eye on the wild science of the false religions,

and professed to detect in it at least striking analogies with the

deductions of both the geologist and the astronomer. When the skeptical

wits of the last century wished to produce, by way of foil, a morality

vastly superior, as they said, to that of Christianity, they had

recourse to the Brahmins and the Chinese. And though we hear less of the

ethics of these people since we have come to know them better, we are

still occasionally reminded of the superiority of their science.

Hinduism has been regarded as furnishing examples of the geologic

doctrine of a succession of creations extended over immensely protracted

geologic periods; and Buddhism represented as charged with both the

geologic doctrine and the perhaps less certain astronomic deduction of a

plurality of worlds. And before entering on our general argument, it may

be well to show by specimen what mere chance hits these are, and how

enormous the amount of the nonsense and absurdity really is in which

they are set.

When Brahma, wearied with the work of producing and maintaining the

universe, goes to sleep, say the Hindus,--an occurrence which happens at

the end of every four millions of years,--a deluge of water rises high

above the sun and moon, and the worlds and their inhabitants are

destroyed. When he awakes, however, he immediately sets himself to

produce anew; and another universe springs up, consisting, like the

former one, of ten worlds placed over each other, like the stories of a

tall building, and replenished with plants and animals. Of these our own

world is the eighth in number, reckoning from the ground floor upwards;

there are seven worlds worse than itself beneath it, and two better ones

above; with a few worlds more higher up still, to which the destroying

flood does not reach, save once or twice in an eternity or so; and

which, in consequence, have not to be re-created each time with the

others. The special forms which the upper and nether worlds exhibit do

not seem to be very well known; but that which man inhabits is "flat,

like the flower of the water-lily, in which the petals project beyond

each other;" and it has in all, including sea and land, a diameter of

several hundred thousand _millions_ of miles. It has its many great

oceans,--one of these (unfortunately the only one in contact with man's

place of habitation) of salt water, one of sugar-cane juice, one of

spirituous liquor, one of clarified butter, and one of sour curds. It

has, besides, its very great ocean of sweet water. And around all,

forming a sort of gigantic hoop or ring, there extends a continent of

pure gold. Of all the luminaries that rise over this huge world, the sun

is the nearest: the distance of the moon is twice as great; the lesser

fixed stars occur immediately beyond; then Mercury, then Venus, then

Mars, then Jupiter, then Saturn; and finally, the great bear and the

polar star. And such is that cosmogony and astronomy of the Brahmins to

which their religion, in its character as a revelation, stands

committed, and in which a very lenient criticism has found the geologic

revolutions. Let me draw my next illustration from Buddhism, the most

ancient and most widely spread religion of the East; for, though

partially overlaid in the great Indian peninsula by the more modern

monstrosities of Brahminism, it extends in one direction from the

Persian Gulf to Formosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of

Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms of heathenism

darken so large a portion of the map as Buddhism,--a superstition which

is estimated to include within its pale nearly one third of the whole

human species.

It has been held, I need scarce say, by most astronomers since the times

of Newton, that the universe consists of innumerable systems of worlds,

furnished each with its own sun; and held by most geologists during the

last fifty years, that the past duration of our earth was divided into

periods of vast extent, each of which had a creation of its own. And

certainly in Buddhism we find both these ideas,--the idea of the

existence of separate systems, each with its own sun; and the idea of

successive periods, each with its own creation. We ascertain on

examination; however, that in the superstition they are not scientific

ideas at all, but mere chance guesses, set, like those of Brahminism,

in a farago of wild and monstrous fable. Each of the many systems of

which the universe is composed consists, say the Buddhists, of three

worlds of a circular form, joined together at the edges, so that there

intervenes between them an angular interspace, which constitutes their

common hell; and to each of these systems there is a sun and moon

apportioned, that take their daily journeys over them, returning at

night through a void space underneath. And each of the bygone successive

creations was a creation originated, it is added, out of chaos, through

the stored-up merits of the Buddhas, and the effects of a

life-invigorating rain, and which sank into chaos again when the old

stock of merit, accumulated in the previous period, was exhausted. The

creatures of each period, too, whether brute or human, were animated by

but the souls of former creatures embodied anew. In the centre of each

of the three worlds of which a system or _sackwala_ consists, there is a

vast mountain, more than forty thousand miles in height, surrounded by a

circular sea, which is in turn surrounded by a ring of land and rock.

Another circular sea lies outside the ring, and a second solid ring

outside the sea; and thus rings of land and water alternate from the

centre to the circumference. According to the geography of the Buddhas,

a model of our own earth would exactly resemble that old-fashioned

ornament,--a work of the turning-lathe,--which some of my auditors must

have seen roughening the upper board of the ornate parlor bellows of the

last century, and which consisted of a large central knob, surrounded by

alternate circular rings and furrows. And as in the old-fashioned

bellows each ring flattened, and each furrow became shallower, in

proportion as it was removed from the centre, so in the Buddhist earth,

the seas, from being many thousand miles deep in the inner rings,

shallow so greatly, that in the outer rings their depth is only an

inch; while the continents, from being forty thousand miles high, sink

into mere plains, almost on the level of the surrounding ocean. Such is

the geography to which this religion pledges itself. Its astronomy, on

the other hand, is not quite so bad as that to which Father Cullen has

affixed his imprimatur, seeing that, though it gives the same sort of

diurnal journey to the sun, it confers upon it a diameter, not of only

six feet, but of four hundred miles. Nor is its geology a great deal

worse than that of many Christians. It makes the earth consist,

reckoning from its foundations upwards, of a layer of wind, a layer of

water, a layer of substance resembling honey, a layer of rock, and a

layer of soil. Such is a small portion of the natural science of

Buddhism: the minute details of its monstrous cosmogony, with its

descriptions of fabulous oceans, inhabited by fishes thousands of miles

in length, and of wonderful forests abounding in trees four hundred

miles high, and haunted by singing lions that leap two miles at a bound,

occupy many chapters of the sacred volumes. Every form of faith has its

heretics; and there are, it would seem, heretics among even the

Buddhists, who, instead of adopting the nonsense of the priests in this

physical department, originate a nonsense equally great of their own.

The error of concluding that the worlds of the universe are finite in

number, say the sacred books, is the heresy _antawada_; the error of

concluding that the world itself is infinite is the heresy _anantawada_;

the error of concluding that the world is finite vertically but infinite

horizontally is the heresy _anantanantawada_; and the error of

concluding the world to be neither finite nor infinite is the heresy

_nawantanantawada_. A name equally formidable would be, of course, found

for the students of modern astronomy and the other kindred sciences,

among the professed believers in Buddh, did not these contrive to get

over the difficulty by observing, "that certain things, as stated in

the _Sastras_, must have been so formerly; but great changes have taken

place in these in latter times; and for astronomical purposes

astronomical rules must be followed."

Believers in Buddhism may be still found by tens of millions on the

shores of the Yellow Sea. Let me select my third specimen of a

universe-fashioning mythology from a faith, long since extinct, that had

its seat on the opposite side of the Old World, along the coasts of the

Northern Atlantic. The old Teutonic religion professed to reveal, like

that of Buddh and of Brahma, _how_ the heavens and earth were formed,

and of _what_. Ymir, the great frost-giant, a being mysteriously

engendered out of frozen vapor, was slain by the god Odin and his

brothers; and, dragging his body into the middle of the universe, they

employed the materials of which it was composed in forming the earth. Of

his blood they made the vast ocean, and all the lakes and rivers; of his

flesh they constructed the land, placing it in the midst of the waters;

of his bones they built up the mountains; his teeth and jaws they broke

up into the stones and pebbles of the earth and shore; of his great

skull they fashioned the vault of the heavens; and, tossing his brains

into the air, they became the clouds. Earth, sea, and sky, however, thus

made, were supported by the great ash-tree Yggdrasill, which, with its

roots anchored deep in the primordial abyss, rose up through the vast

central mountains of the world, and, stretching forth its branches to

the furthest heaven, bore the stars as its fruit. Encircling the whole

earth like a ring, lay the huge snake Midgard,--always hidden in the

sea, save when half drawn forth on one occasion by the god Thor; outside

the snake a broader ring of ice-mountains swept round both land and

ocean, and formed the outer frame of the world,--for there lay only

blank space beyond; and over all, the sun and moon performed their

journeys, chased through the sky by ravenous wolves, that ever sought to

devour them. Such was the wild dream of our Scandinavian ancestors,--a

dream, however, that occupied as prominent a place in their Edda as any

of their other religious beliefs, and which, with the first dawn of

science, would not only have fallen itself, but would have also dragged

down the others along with it.

Now this physical department has ever proved the vulnerable portion of

false religions,--the portion which, if I may use the metaphor, their

originators could not dip in the infernal river. The ability of drawing

the line, in the early and ignorant ages of the world, between what man

can of himself discover and what he cannot, is an ability which man

cannot possibly possess. The ancient Chaldeans, who first watched the

motions of the planets, could not possibly have foreseen, that while on

the one hand men would be one day able of themselves to measure and

weigh these bodies, and to determine their distances from the earth and

from each other, men might never be able of themselves to demonstrate

the fact of their authorship, or to discover the true character of their

author. Nay, if they could have at all thought on the subject, the

latter would have seemed to them by much the simpler discovery of the

two. To know at such a time what was in reality discoverable and what

was not, would be to know by anticipation what is not yet known,--the

limits of all human knowledge. It would be to trace a line non-existent

at the period, and untraceable, in the nature of things, until the

history of the human race shall be completed. It was held by even the

sagacious Socrates, that men cannot arrive at any certainty in questions

respecting the form or motion of the earth, or the mechanism of the

heavens; and so he set himself to elucidate what he deemed much simpler

matters,--to prove, for instance, as we find in the Phedon, that human

souls existed ere they came to inhabit their mortal bodies, and retained

faint recollections of great misfortunes that had overtaken them ere

their embodiment as men, and of sufferings to which they had been

subjected in a primevous state. And lacking this ability of

distinguishing between the naturally discoverable and what cannot be

naturally discovered, the originators of the old mythologic beliefs

obtruded into provinces in which ultimately the lawless nature of the

obtrusion could not fail to be detected; and thus, by making their false

science a portion of their false religion, they created what was

afterwards to prove its weakest and most vulnerable part. We absolutely

know that the course at present pursued by enlightened Christian

missionaries in India is to bring scientific truth into direct

antagonism with the monstrously false science of the pretended

revelations of Parseeism, Brahminism, and Buddhism; and that by this

means the general falsity of these systems has been so plainly shown,

that it has become a matter of doubt whether a single educated native of

any considerable ability in reality believes in them. They seem to have

lost their hold of all the minds capable of appreciating the weight and

force of scientific evidence.

Let us further remark, that since it seems inevitable that pretended

revelations of ancient date should pledge themselves to a false science,

the presumption must be strong that an ancient revelation of great

multiplicity of detail, which has _not_ so pledged itself, is not a

false, but a true revelation. Nay, if we find in it the line drawn

between what man can know of himself and what he cannot know, and

determine that this line was traced in a remote and primitive age, we

have positive evidence in the circumstance, good so far as it extends,

of its Divine origin. Now, it will be ultimately found that this line

was drawn with exquisite precision in the Hebrew Scriptures,--not

merely the most ancient works that profess to be revelations, but

absolutely the most ancient of all writings. Unfortunately, however,

what God seems to have done for his Revelation, influential theologians

of both the Romish and Orthodox Churches have labored hard to undo; and,

from their mistaking, in not a few remarkable passages, the scope and

object of the vouchsafed message, they have at various times striven to

pledge it to a science as false as even that of Buddhist, Teuton, or

Hindu. And so, not only has the argument been weakened and obscured

which might be founded on the rectitude of the line drawn of old between

what ought and what ought not to be the subject of revelation, but even

a positive argument has been furnished to the infidel,--ever ready to

identify the glosses of the theologian with the enunciations of

revelation itself,--similar to that which the Christian missionary

directs against the false religions of India. It may be well briefly to

inquire how this unlucky mistake has originated.

It is of first importance often to the navigator that he should have a

good chronometer, seeing that his ability of determining his exact

position on wide seas, and, in consequence, of determining also the

exact place and bearing of the rocks and reefs which he must avoid, and

of the lands and harbors on which he must direct his course, must very

much depend upon the rectitude of his instrument. But it may be of very

little importance to him to know how chronometers are made. And so a

friend may reveal to him where the best chronometers are to be

purchased, with the name of the maker, without at the same time

revealing to him the principle on which they are constructed. Let us

suppose, however, that from some peculiarity in the mode of the

revelation, the navigator has come to believe that it includes both

items,--an enunciation regarding the place where and the maker from

whom the best chronometers are to be had, and a further enunciation

regarding the true mechanism of chronometers. Let us suppose further,

that while the good faith and intelligence of his friend are

unquestionable, the supposed revelation regarding the construction of

chronometers, which he thinks he owes to him, is altogether erroneous

and absurd. The chronometer mainly differs from the ordinary watch in

being formed of a mixture of metals, which preserve so nice a chemical

balance, that those changes of temperature which quicken or retard the

movements of common time-pieces fail to affect it. Now, let us suppose

that the friend and adviser of the sailor had said to him,--using a

common metonymy,--there are no chronometers anywhere constructed that so

_completely neutralize the temperature_ as the ones I recommend to you;

and that the sailor had at once leaped to the conclusion, that the

remark was authority enough for holding that it is the principle of

chronometers, not to be composed of such counteractive combinations of

metals as that the expansion of one shall be checked by the contraction

of another, but to keep up an equal temperature within through a

heat-engendering quality in the amalgamated metals. Such a mistake might

be readily enough originated in this way; and yet it would be a very

serious mistake indeed; seeing that it would substitute an active for a

passive principle,--a principle of equalizing the temperature by acting

upon it, for a principle of inert impassibility to the temperature. And

of course not only would the sailor himself be in error in taking such a

view, but he might seriously compromise the intelligence or integrity of

his friend in the judgment of all who held, on his testimony, that it

was with his friend, and not from his own misconception of his friend's

meaning, that the view had originated. And how, let us ask, ere

dismissing our lengthened illustration, is an error such as the

supposed one here to be tested, and its erroneousness exposed? There can

be but one reply to such a query. It might be wholly in vain to fall

back upon the _ipsissima verba_ of the revelation made by the sailor's

friend. Though in reality but an enunciation regarding the _authorship_

of certain chronometers, it might possibly enough appear, from its

metonymic character, to be also a revelation regarding the

_construction_ of chronometers. The sailor's error respecting the

construction of chronometers is to be tested and exposed, not by any

references to what his friend had said, but by the art of the

chronometer maker. The demonstrable principles of the art, as practised

by the makers of chronometers, must be the test of all supposed

_revelations_ regarding the principles and mechanism of chronometer

making.

[Illustration: Fig. 114.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF COSMAS.[33]

(_From a reduced facsimile of the original print in the British

Museum._)]