The Testimony of the Rocks Part 14

Kitto, "speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters had subsided." The statement must have been hazarded in ignorance of the peculiar habits of many of the non-migratory birds. Up till about the middle of the last century, the capercailzie, or great c.o.c.k of the woods, was a native of Scotland. It was exterminated, however, about the time of the last Rebellion, or not long after: the last specimen seen among the pine forests of Strathspey was killed, it is said, in the year 1745: the last specimen seen among the woods of Strathgla.s.s survived till the year 1760. Pennant relates that he saw in 1769 a specimen, probably a stuffed one, that had been killed shortly before in the neighborhood of Inverness. But from at least that time the species disappeared from the British islands; and, though it continued to exist in Norway, did not "replenish the tracts from which it had been extirpated." The late Marquis of Breadalbane was at no small cost and trouble in re-introducing the species, and to some extent he succeeded; but the capercailzie is, I understand, still restricted to the Breadalbane woods. I have seen the golden eagle annihilated as a species in move than one district of the north of Scotland; nor, though it still exists in other parts of the kingdom, and is comparatively common among the mountains of Norway, have I known it in any instance to spread anew over the tracts from which it had been extirpated. So much for the general reasonings of Dr. Kitto. Further, we find him stating, that a deluge which could overspread the region inhabited by birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove, could hardly have been less than universal. The doctor, however, ought to have known that the _dove_ is a _family_, not a _species_. All the American species of doves, for example, differ from the six European species, three of which are to be found in Scotland. Of even the American pa.s.senger pigeons (_Ectopistes migratoria_), which occur in such numbers in their native country as actually to eclipse, during their migratory flights, the light of day, only a single straggler,--the one whose chance visit has been recorded by Dr. Fleming,--seems to have been ever seen in Britain. And the East has also its own peculiar species, unknown to Europe. The golden-green pigeons and the great crowned pigeons of the Indian isles are never seen in northern and western lat.i.tudes, save in stuffed specimens in a museum. The Vinago pigeons, with their vividly bright plumes, though they exist in several species, are all restricted to the woods of the torrid zone. Even the collared dove of Africa and the Levant rarely visits, and then only as a straggler, the western and northern parts of Europe. The blue-capped turteline pigeon is restricted, as a species, to the island of Celebes; the blue and green turteline pigeon is a native of New Guinea; the Cape turtle occurs in but the southern parts of Africa; the Nicobar ground pigeon in but the Indian Archipelago; the magnificent fruit pigeon in the eastern parts of Australia; and the crowned goura pigeon, the giant of its family, in the Molucca Islands.

No single species of dove seems to be so widely spread but that it might be exterminated in a merely partial deluge; and of course conjecture may in vain weary itself in striving to determine what that particular species was which Noah sent forth as a messenger from the ark, or in inquiring what was the extent of the area which it occupied? The common raven is more widely spread than any single species of pigeon. Even the raven, however, seems restricted to the northern hemisphere. India and Southern Africa have both their ravens; but the species differ from each other, and from the widely spread northern one. It is a question whether even the pied raven of the Faroe Isles be not a distinct bird from the black raven of our own country: if not an independent species, it is at least a very remarkable variety. Further, when extirpated in a district, it is found that, as in the case of the capercailzie and the golden eagle, the neighboring regions in which the raven continues to exist fail for ages to furnish a fresh supply. There are counties in England in which the raven is now never seen; and I am acquainted with a district in the north of Scotland from which, when a pair that were known to breed for more than a century in a tall cliff were destroyed by the fowler, the species disappeared.[28] Such, when examined, are the arguments drawn by Dr. Kitto from natural science; nor is he in any degree happier when he resorts to arguments more restrictedly physical.

"If," we find him saying, "the waters of the Deluge rose fifteen cubits above all the mountains of the countries which the raven and the dove inhabit, _the level must have been high enough to give universality to the Deluge_." The only point here not already dealt with,--for I have just shown that certain species of the dove and the raven might have of necessity been inmates of the ark, though the Flood had been only a partial one,--is that which refers to the submergence of the hills over at least an extensive tract, and to the inference, evident in the pa.s.sage, that if lofty mountains were covered in one portion of the globe, mountains of similar alt.i.tude must have been equally covered in every other portion of it.

The inference here seems to be founded on a common but altogether mistaken view of some of the grandest operations of nature with which modern science has brought us acquainted. It has been well remarked, that when two opposing explanations of extraordinary natural phenomena are given,--one of a simple and seemingly common sense character, the other complex and apparently absurd,--it is almost always safer to adopt the apparently absurd than the seemingly common sense one. Dr. Kitto's "plain man," yielding to the dictates of what he would deem common sense,--which, of course, in questions of natural science is tantamount to common nonsense,--would be sure to go wrong. And we find the remark not inaptly ill.u.s.trated by the now well established fact, that while the medium level of the ocean is one of the most fixed lines in nature, the level of the great continents, with their table-lands and mountains, is an ever fluctuating line. It may seem strange that land should be less stable than water. We see the tide rising and falling twice every twenty-four hours, and the rock ever remaining in its place;--we speak of the fixed earth and the unstable sea. And yet, while we have no evidence whatever that the sea level has changed during at least the ages of the Tertiary formations, and absolutely know that it could not have varied more than a few yards, or at most a few fathoms, we have direct evidence that during that time great mountain chains, many thousand feet in height, such as the Alps, have arisen from the bottom of the ocean, and that great continents have sunk beneath it and disappeared. The larger part of northern Europe and America have been covered by the sea since our present group of sh.e.l.ls began to exist; and it seems not improbable that the lower portion of the valley of the Jordan was depressed to its present low level of thirteen hundred feet beneath the Mediterranean since the times of the deluge. On several parts of the coasts of Britain and Ireland the voyager can look down through the clear sea, in depths to which the tide never falls, on the remains of submerged forests; and it is a demonstrable fact, that even during the present age there are certain extensive tracts of land which have sunk beneath the sea level, while certain other extensive tracts have been elevated over it. In 1819, a wide expanse of country in the delta of the Indus, containing fully two thousand square miles of flat meadow, was converted by a sudden depression of the land, accompanied by an earthquake, into an inland sea; and the tower of a small fort, which occupied nearly the middle of the sunken area, and on which many of the inhabitants of a neighboring village succeeded in saving themselves, may still be seen raising its shattered head over the surface,--the only object visible in a waste of waters of which the eye fails to determine the extent. About three years after this event, a tract of country, interposed between the foot of the Andes and the Pacific, more than equal in area to all Great Britain, was elevated from two to seven feet over its former level, and rocks laid bare in the sea, which the pilots and fishermen of the coast had never before seen. On the Indian coast the sea _seemed_ to be rising at nearly the same time when it _appeared_ to be falling on the American one; and on the latter such was the actual impression entertained by the people. It is stated by Sir Charles Lyell, in his "Elements," that he was informed by Mr. Cruickshanks, an English botanist who resided in Chili at the time, "that it was the general belief of the fishermen and inhabitants, _not_ that the land had risen, but that the ocean had permanently retreated." But if it had retreated from the Chilian sh.o.r.e, how could it have risen on the Indian one? In like manner the sea appears to be receding from the north-eastern sh.o.r.es of Sweden at the rate of nearly four vertical feet in the century; while it seems to be advancing on the western coasts of Greenland at apparently a rate more considerable, though there the ratio of its rise has not been marked with equal care. It seems to be rising on even the Swedish province of Scania; while all the time, however, the actual motion,--upwards in one region, downwards in another,--is in the solid earth,--not in the unstable water, which merely serves as a sort of hydrostatic _level_, to indicate this fact of subsidence or elevation in the land. And of course all the reasoning, founded on mere appearances, that would reverse the process by a.s.signing permanency to the level of the land, and fluctuation to that of the sea, would lead to inevitable error.

Let us, for the ill.u.s.tration's sake, suppose that the British islands had been the scene of the Deluge; and that it had been occasioned by a gradual depression in the earth's surface of about fifteen hundred miles in length, a thousand miles in breadth, five thousand feet in depth in its centre, and which gradually trended all around towards the sides.

Such a depression would form a scarce appreciable inequality on the surface of even a three feet globe; in a twelve inch globe it might be represented by the abrasion of a small patch of the varnish; nor would it have in nature one sixth the depth, or one sixteenth the area, of the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. Let us suppose further, that it had been produced by an equable sinking of the surface, prolonged for forty days at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five feet per day,--a motion not equal to that of the minute-hand of a clock whose dial plate measures two feet in diameter. Further, let us suppose that a thoroughly intelligent man,--let us say Dr. Kitto himself,--secure from all personal danger in an ark perched on some such commanding eminence as Arthur's Seat, had been a witness of the catastrophe; and that, instead of having merely to reason respecting it after the lapse of more than four thousand years, he had been enabled to bear testimony regarding it from the evidence of his senses. In the first place, let me remark that the sinking or downward motion of the earth's crust would be altogether inappreciable by sense; in the next, that the depression, even when it had reached its acme, would in no sensible degree affect the contour of surrounding objects. Even at the end of the forty days, when the five thousand feet of depression had been reached, the gradient of declination across the sunken area would not exceed _ten_ feet per mile, and across the larger diameter would amount to but _six feet eight inches_ per mile. Of course, at the end of the twentieth day the gradients would be represented by but one half these sums, and would be altogether inappreciable in the landscape; the hills would seem quite as high as before, and the valleys not more profound. The only sensible sign felt or visible of what was taking place would be simply a persistent rising of the sea at somewhat less than twice its rate of flow during stream tides. Ocean, as if forgetful of its ancient bounds, would continue to encroach upon the land. On the second day the greater part of what is now the site of Edinburgh would be covered; on the seventh day the tide would have reached the vessel perched on the top of the hill now known as Arthur's Seat; on the sixteenth day the highest peak of the Pentlands would have disappeared; and in nine days more the distant summit of Ben Lomond. From the roof of the slowly drifting ark nothing would then have appeared save a sh.o.r.eless ocean. But it would have taken yet other eleven days ere the proud crest of Ben Nevis, the highest land in the British islands, would have been submerged; and the eve of the fortieth day would have seen it covered by little more than five hundred feet of water. An actual witness, in such circ.u.mstances, however intelligent, could have but testified to the persistent rise of the sea, accompanied mayhap by rain and tempest; he could but tell how that for many days together it had been flood without ebb, as if the fountains of the great deep had been broken up; and that at length he was encompa.s.sed by what seemed a sh.o.r.eless ocean. But he would certainly depart perilously from his position as a witness-bearer, were he to argue, that when his ark had begun to float on a hill eight hundred feet in height, all hills upon the surface of the globe of a corresponding alt.i.tude must have been also covered; or that, from what was in reality but a local depression, a universal deluge might be legitimately inferred. His error would be of the same nature (though of course immensely greater) as that of the native of Chili who held, that because the ocean had retreated from the coasts of his own country, it had of necessity also retreated from the delta of the Indus; or as that of the inhabitant of Cutch who held, that as the sea had risen high over his native districts, it had also of necessity overflowed the coasts of Chili and Aracan.

Dr. Kitto brings forward but one other objection to a Flood only partial, and that the one virtually disposed of by Bishop Stillingfleet in the terminal half of a short sentence. The Bishop "despaired," as he well might, "of ever seeing it proved that the whole earth had been peopled before the Deluge." "It has been much urged of late," says Dr.

Kitto, "that the Deluge was not universal, but was confined to a particular region, which man inhabited. It may be freely admitted that, seeing the object of the Flood was to drown mankind, there was no need that it should extend beyond the region of man's habitation. But this theory necessarily a.s.signs to the world before the Flood a lower population, and a more limited extension of it, than we are prepared to concede." He then goes on to argue, that, as the species increased very rapidly immediately after the Deluge, it must have increased in a ratio at least equally rapid before that catastrophe took place. But how gratuitous the a.s.sumption! It would be quite as safe to infer, that as the human race multiplied greatly in Ireland during the first half of the present century, it must have also multiplied greatly in Italy, a much finer country, during the first half of the fifth century, or in the wealthier portions of Kurdistan during the first half of the thirteenth. Ere applying, however, the Irish ratio of increase to either the Italy of thirteen hundred years ago, or to the Kurdistan of five hundred years ago, it would surely be necessary to take into account the important fact, that these were the ages of Zingis Khan and of Attila; of Zingis Khan, who, on possessing himself of the three capitals of the one country, coolly butchered four millions three hundred and forty-seven thousand persons, their inhabitants; and of that Attila, "the scourge of G.o.d," who used to say, more especially in reference to the other country, that "whenever his horse-hoofs had once trod, the gra.s.s never afterwards grew," and before whose ravages the human race seemed melting away. The terms in which the great wickedness of the antediluvians is described indicate a period of violence and outrage;--the age which preceded the Flood was an age of "giants" and of "mighty men," and of "men of renown,"--forgotten Attilas, Alarics, and Zingis Khans, mayhap,--"giants of mighty bone and bold emprise," who became famous for their "infinite manslaughter," and the thousands whom they destroyed. Such is decidedly the view which the brief Scriptural description suggested to the poets; and certainly, when a question comes to be one of guess work, no other cla.s.s of persons guess half so sagaciously as they. It has not unfrequently occurred to me,--and in a question of this kind one suggestion may be quite as admissible as another,--that the Deluge may have been more a visitation of mercy to the race than of judgment. Even in our own times, as happened in New Zealand during the present century, and in Tahiti about the close of the last, tribes restricted to one tract of country, when seized by the madness of conquest, have narrowly escaped extermination. We know that in some instances better have been destroyed by worse races,--that the more refined have at times yielded to the more barbarous,--yielded so entirely, that all that survived of vast populations and a comparatively high civilization have been broken temples, and great burial mounds locked up in the solitudes of deep forests; and further, that whole peoples, exhausted by their vices, have sunk into such a state of depression and decline, that, unable any longer to supply the inevitable waste of nature, they have dropt into extinction. And such may have been the condition of the human race during that period of portentous evil and violence which preceded the deluge. We know that the good came at length to be restricted to a single family; and even the evil, instead of being numbered, as now, by hundreds of millions, may have been comprised in a few thousands, or at most a few hundred thousands, that were becoming fewer every year, from the indulgence of fierce and evil pa.s.sions, in a time of outrage and violence. The Creator of the race may have dealt with it on this occasion of judgment, as a florist does with some decaying plant, which he cuts down to the ground in order to secure a fresh shoot from the root. At all events, the _proof_ of an antediluvian population at once enormously great and very largely spread must rest with those who hold, with Dr. Kitto, that its numbers and extent were such as to militate against the probability of a deluge merely partial; and any such proof we may, with the good old Bishop of Worcester, well "despair of ever seeing" produced. Even admitting, however, for the argument's sake, that the inhabitants of the Old World may have been as numerous as those of China are now,--a number estimated by the recent authorities at more than three hundred and fifty millions,--and the admission is certainly greatly larger than there is argument enough on the other side to extort,--a comparatively partial deluge would have been sufficient to secure their destruction. In short, it may be fairly concluded, that if there be a show of reason against the theory of a flood merely local, it has not yet been exhibited. Even Dr. Kitto, with all his ingenuity and learning, has failed to array against it arguments of any real weight or cogency; and in my next address I may be perhaps able to show you that the objections which, on the other hand, bear against the antagonist hypothesis, are at once solid and numerous. I may be mistaken in my estimate; but for some years past I have regarded them as altogether insurmountable.

LECTURE EIGHTH.

THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.

PART II.

A century has not yet gone by since all the organic remains on which the science of Palaeontology 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls which had been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land to their homes; or that they were sh.e.l.ls that had gone astray from cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not sh.e.l.ls at all, but mere sh.e.l.l-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 Palaeontologic 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 mult.i.tude of fossil sh.e.l.ls and bones; and, when penning his article for the Encyclopaedia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the sh.e.l.l-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 Jura.s.sic 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls? Or are not many of these sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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 sh.e.l.ls, and only admitted them as _lusus naturae_, 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 _exuviae_ 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sertions 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 Palaeontology, 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,--Palaeozoic, 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 pa.s.sing, 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 osars, and moraines of the _higher_ lat.i.tudes. For it is a fact very significant in its bearings on the diluvial controversy, that it is in the higher lat.i.tudes 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 lat.i.tude; and in Europe in the other, to the fortieth; and in America to even the thirty-eighth degree of north lat.i.tude. 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 sh.e.l.ls 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-cla.s.s 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-sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls, such as the pholodadidae, 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 hyaena, 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 carca.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance too, that the remains of these fossil elephants, tigers, and hyaenas, should be a.s.sociated 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 carca.s.ses 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 a.s.sociated, _that_ was exactly what Mr. Penn would have expected in the circ.u.mstances. It was the result of a tumultuary flood, which had brought together in our northern region the floating carca.s.ses 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 hyaena, were entirely different from the intertropical species; that they differed from them very considerably more than the a.s.s 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 a.s.sumption 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 p.r.o.nounced a dead a.s.s 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 a.s.sertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times acc.u.mulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why might not a universal flood have acc.u.mulated on this special tract of drift, the carca.s.ses 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 carca.s.s 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 hyaenas_ 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_."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 lat.i.tudes, 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 hyaenas. 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 hyaenas 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 a.s.serting 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 ga.s.ses evolved during putrefaction blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble, somewhat as a gla.s.s-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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.signing 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 s.p.a.ce. It was a sort of stock problem, that required, it was thought, no very high attainments to solve. Eighty years have not yet pa.s.sed 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 quant.i.ty 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 s.p.a.ce 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. b.u.t.ton, 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 a.s.s 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 amphibiae, 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 Africa.n.u.s_ 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. Java.n.u.s_, _Rh. Sumatrensis_, _Rh. Africa.n.u.s_, _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 circ.u.mstances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle.

Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, which refer to a cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances lies of necessity on the a.s.sertors 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 cla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 mult.i.tudes 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 cla.s.s be preserved. And be it remembered, that the expedient of having recourse to supposit.i.tious 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 supposit.i.tious 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 a.s.semblage, than the peculiar manner in which we now find these animals distributed over the earth's surface. Linnaeus 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 cla.s.s 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, o