Chapter 4

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 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 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 multitude of fossil shells and bones; and, when penning his article for the Encyclopaedia, 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 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 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 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 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 oesars, 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 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 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 hyaenas, 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 hyaena, 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 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_."

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 echidnae, 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?

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 scoriae 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 Aetna, 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 Aetna 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 Aetna, 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 Aetna 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 Aetna, 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 Aetna 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.

(_From a reduced facsimile of the original print in the British Museum._)]

Now, it will be found that those mistakes of the theologians to which I refer have been exactly similar to that of the navigator in the supposed case, and that they are mistakes which must be corrected on exactly the same principle. The departments in which the mistakes have been made, have, as in the false religious, been chiefly three,--the geographic, astronomic, and geologic provinces. The geographic errors are of comparatively ancient date. They belong mainly to the later patristic and earlier middle ages, when the monk Cosmas, as the geographer of the Church, represented the earth as a parallelogrammical plain, twice longer than it was broad, deeply indented by the inland seas,--the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf,--and encompassed by a rectangular trench occupied by the oceans. Some of my audience will, however, remember that of the council of clergymen which met in Salamanca in 1486 to examine and test the views of Christopher Columbus, a considerable portion held it to be grossly heterodox to believe that by sailing westwards the eastern parts of the world could be reached. No one could entertain such a view without also believing that there were antipodes, and that the world was round, not flat,--errors denounced by not only great theologians of the golden age of ecclesiastical learning, such as Lactantius and St. Augustine, but also directly opposed, it was said, to the very letter of Scripture. "They observed," says Washington Irving, in his "Life of Columbus," "that in the Psalms the heavens are said to be extended like a hide,--that is, according to commentators, the curtain or covering of a tent, which among the ancient pastoral nations was formed of the hides of animals; and that St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, compares the heavens to a tabernacle or tent extended over the earth, which they thence inferred must be flat." In the sectional view of Cosmas the heavens are represented as a semicircular vault or tent raised on perpendicular walls; a vast mountain beyond the "Great Sea," lofty as the innermost continent of the Buddhist cosmogony, rises immediately under it; when the sun passed behind this mountain it was night, and when it emerged from it, it was day. And certainly under the crystal box of the monk it would be in vain to attempt, by passing westwards, to arrive at the far east. The cosmogony of Cosmas was also that of the doctors of Salamanca; and the views of Columbus were denounced as heterodox because they failed to conform to it. Such was one of the earlier mistakes of the theologians. When merely told regarding the authorship of the chronometer, they held that they had been told also respecting the mechanism of the chronometer. Attaching literal meanings to what we now recognize as merely poetic or oratorical figures, they believed that not only was it revealed to them that God had created the heavens and earth, but also that he had created the earth in the form of an extended plain, and placed a semi-globular heavens over it, just as one places a semi-globular case of glass over a piece of flower-plot or a miniature thicket of fern. And how, I ask, was this error ultimately corrected? Simply by that science of the geographer which demonstrates that the earth is not flat, but spherical, and that the heavens have not edges, like a skin-tent or glass-case, to come anywhere in contact with it, but consist mainly of a diffused atmosphere, with illimitable space beyond.

(_Sectional View._)]

The second great error to which the theologians would fain have pledged the truth of Scripture was an error in the astronomical province. I need scarce refer to the often-adduced case of Galileo. The doctrine which the philosopher had to "abjure, curse, and detest," and which he was never again to teach, "because erroneous, heretical, and contrary to Scripture," was the doctrine of the earth's motion and the sun's stability. But to the part taken by our Protestant divines in the same controversy,--men still regarded as authorities in their own proper walk,--I must be allowed to refer, as less known, though not less instructive, than that enacted by the Romish Church in the case of Galileo. "This, we affirm, that is, that the earth rests, and the sun moves daily around it," said Voetius, a great Dutch divine of the middle of the seventeenth century, "with all divines, natural philosophers, Jews and Mohammedans, Greeks and Latins, excepting one or two of the ancients, and the modern followers of Copernicus." And we detect Heideggeri, a Swiss theologian, who flourished about half an age later, giving expression, a few years ere the commencement of the last century, to a similar view, as the one taken by himself and many others, and as a view "from which," he states, "our pious reverence for the Scriptures, the word of truth, will not allow us to depart." A still more remarkable instance occurs in Turrettine, whom we find in one of his writings arguing in the strictly logical form, "in opposition to certain philosophers," and in behalf of the old Ptolemaic doctrine that the sun moves in the heavens and revolves round the earth, while the earth itself remains at rest in the midst. "_First_," he remarks, "the sun is said in Scripture to move in the heavens, and to rise and set. 'The sun is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.' 'The sun knoweth his going down.' 'The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down.' _Secondly_, The sun by a miracle stood still in the time of Joshua; and by a miracle it went back in the time of Hezekiah. _Thirdly_, The earth is said to be fixed immovably. 'The earth is also established that it cannot be moved.' 'Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth.' 'They continue this day according to their ordinance.' _Fourthly_, Neither could birds, which often fly off through an hour's circuit, be able to return to their nests. _Fifthly_, Whatever flies or is suspended in the air ought (by this theory) to move from west to east; but this is proved not to be true, from birds, arrows shot forth, atoms made manifest in the sun, and down floating in the atmosphere." The theologian, after thus laying down the law, sets himself to meet objections. If it be urged that the Scriptures in natural things speak according to the common opinion, Turrettine answers, "_First_, The Spirit of God best understands natural things. _Secondly_, That in giving instruction in religion, he meant these things should be used, not abused. _Thirdly_, That he is not the author of any error. _Fourthly_, Neither is he to be corrected on the pretence of our blind reason." If it be further urged, that birds, the air, and all things are moved with the earth, he answers, "_First_, That this is a mere fiction, since air is a fluid body; and _secondly_, if so, by what force would birds be able to go from east to west?"

Now this I must regard as a passage as instructive as it is extraordinary. Turrettine was one of the most accomplished theologians of his age; nor is that age by any means a remote one. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, had all finished their labors long ere he published this passage; nay, at the time when his work issued from the Amsterdam press (1695), Isaac Newton had attained his fifty-third year; and fully ten years previous, Professor David Gregory, nephew of the inventor of the Gregorian telescope, had begun to teach, from his chair in the University of Edinburgh, the doctrine of gravitation and the true mechanism of the heavens, as unfolded in the Newtonian philosophy. The learned theologian, had he applied himself to astronomical science, could have found at the time very enlightened teachers; but falling into exactly the mistake of the sailor of my illustration, or that into which, two centuries before, the doctors of Salamanca had fallen, he set himself, instead, to contend with the astronomers, and, to the extent of his influence, labored to pledge revelation to an astronomy as false as that of the Buddhist, Hindu, or old Teuton. His mistake, I repeat, was exactly that of the sailor. Though in the Scriptures only the fact of the _authorship_ of the great chronometer set in the heavens "to be a sign for seasons, and for days and years," is revealed, he regarded himself as also informed respecting the principles on which the chronometer was constructed, or at least respecting the true nature of its movements; and several very important deductions may, I think, be drawn from the carefully constructed passage in which he so unwittingly records his error, and the grounds of it. In the first place, we may safely hold that the texts of Scripture quoted by so able a theologian are those which have most the appearance of being revelations to men respecting the motions of the heavenly bodies. We may conclusively infer, that if _they_ do not reveal the character of those motions, then nowhere in Scripture is their character revealed. In the second place, it is obvious that the cited texts do _not_ reveal the nature of the motions. It would be as rational to hold that our best almanacs reveal the Ptolemaic astronomy. In the scientific portion of our almanacs there occur many phrases which are perfectly well understood, and indicate very definitely what the writer really intends to express by them, that yet, taken literally, are not scientifically true. The words, "Sun rises," and "Sun sets," and "Moon rises," and "Moon sets," occur in every page; there are two pages--those devoted to the months of March and September--in which the phrase occurs, "Sun crosses the equinoctial line;" and further, in the other pages, such phrases as "Sun enters Aries," "Sun enters Taurus," "Sun enters Gemini," &c., &c., are not unfrequent. The phrase, "new moon," is also of common occurrence. And these phrases, interpreted after the manner of Turrettine, and according to their strict grammatical meaning, would of course imply that the sun has a motion round our planet,--that the moon moves round it every twenty-four hours,--and that the earth is provided every month with a new satellite. And yet we know that none of these ideas are in the mind of the writer who, in compiling the almanac, employs the phrases. He employs them to indicate, not the nature of the heavenly motions, but the exact time when, from the several motions of the earth, the sun and moon are brought into certain apparent positions with respect to either the earth itself or to the celestial signs; or to indicate the time at which the moon completes its monthly revolution, and presents a wholly darkened disk to the earth. The commentator skilful enough to pledge the almanac, in virtue of the literal meaning of the specified phrases, to the old Ptolemaic hypothesis, would pledge it to a false science, which its author never held. And such, evidently, has been the part enacted by Turrettine and the elder theologians. The Scriptural phrases are in no degree more express respecting the motion of the sun and the other heavenly bodies than those of the almanac, which, we know, do not refer to motion at all, but to time. Nor are we less justified in holding that the cited Scriptures do not refer to _motion_, but to _authorship_. In the third place, however, it is not by any mere reconsideration of the adduced passages that the error, once made, is to be corrected. In a purely astronomic question the appeal lies, not to Scripture, but to astronomic science. And in the fourth place, the reasonings of Turrettine, when, quitting his own proper walk, he discourses, not as a theologian, but as a natural philosopher, are such as to read a lesson not wholly unneeded in the present day. They show how in a department in which it demanded the united life-long labors of a Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to elicit the truth, the hasty guesses of a great theologian, rashly ventured in a polemic spirit, gave form and body to but ludicrous error. It is not after a fashion so impetuous and headlong that the elaborately wrought key must be plied which unlocks the profound mysteries of nature. But of this more anon.

Let me remark in the passing, that while Turrettine, one of the greatest of theologians, failed, as we have seen, to find in Scripture the fact of astronomic _construction_, La Place, one of the greatest of the astronomers, failed in a manner equally signal to find in his science the fact of astronomic _authorship_. The profound Frenchman (whom Sir David Brewster well characterizes as "the philosopher to whom posterity will probably assign the place next to Newton "), by demonstrating that certain irregularities in the motion of the heavenly bodies, which had been supposed to indicate a future termination to the whole, were but mere oscillations, subject to periodic correction, and indicative of no such termination in consequence, demonstrated also that, from all that appears, the present astronomical movements might go on forever. And as he could find in the solar system no indications of an end, so was he unable, he said, to find in it any trace of a beginning. He failed in discovering in all astronomy the fact of authorship, just as Turrettine had failed in finding in all Scripture the fact of astronomic construction. And here lies, I am inclined to think, the true line between revelation and science,--a line drawn of old with a God-derived precision, which can be rightly appreciated neither by mere theologians like Turrettine, nor by mere men of science like La Place, but which is notwithstanding fraught with an evidence direct in its bearing on the truth of Scripture. That great fact, moral in its influence, of the authorship of the heavens and earth, which the science of La Place failed of itself to discover, and which was equally unknown to the ancient philosophers, God has revealed. It is "through faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." And, on the other hand, the great truths, physical in their bearing, to the discovery of which science is fully competent, God did not reveal, but left them to be developed piecemeal by the unassisted human faculties. And that ability of nicely drawing the line between the two classes of truths in a very remote age of the world, which we find manifested in the oldest of the Scriptural books, I must regard as an ability which could have been derived only through inspiration, and from God alone.

Let us, however, pursue our argument. Questions of geography, such as those entertained by the theologians of Salamanca, must be tested, we conclude, not by a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to teach geography, but by the findings of geographic science. Questions in astronomy, such as those which Turrettine and the opponents of Galileo entertained, must be tried, we hold, not by a revelation never intended to teach astronomy, but by the findings of astronomic science. But how deal, I next ask, with the theologian who holds that geologic fact has been revealed to him? Geology is as thoroughly a physical science as either geography or astronomy. Its facts are equally capable of being educed and established by the unassisted human intellect. It seems quite as unlikely that it should have been made a special subject of revelation, in its character as a science, as either of these sciences; or that the line so nicely maintained with respect to _them_ should have been transgressed with regard to _it_. In short, in order satisfactorily to answer our query, it seems but necessary satisfactorily to answer another, namely, What, in this special department, are truth and fact scientifically ascertained?

There are, however, certain texts that appear to have a more direct bearing on the successive periods of the geologist than any of those that were once held to refer to the form of the earth, or to the nature of the heavenly bodies, are now believed to have on geography or astronomy. No one now holds that there is a geography revealed in Scripture, or regards the cavils of the Salamanca doctors as other than mere aberrations of the human mind. Nor, save mayhap in the darker corners of the Greek and Romish Churches, are there men in the present day who hold that there is a revealed astronomy. The texts so confidently quoted by Turrettine, such as "The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down," are regarded in every Protestant Church as simply tantamount, in their bearing on the question at issue, to the "Sun rises" and "Sun sets" of the almanac. But while the Scriptures do not reveal the form of the earth or the motions of the planets, they do reveal the fact that the miracle of creation was effected, not by a single act, but in several successive acts. And it is with the organisms produced by successive acts of creation, and the formations deposited during the periods in which these acts took place, that the geologist is called on by his science to deal. And hence, while there are now no attempts made to reconcile geographic or astronomic fact with the Scripture passages which refer, in the language of the time, to the glory of the heavens or the stability of the earth, just because it is held that there is really nothing geographic or astronomic in the passages to conflict with the geographic or astronomic facts, we still seek to reconcile the facts of geologic science with what is termed the Mosaic geology. We inquire whether, in its leading features, the Mosaic does not correspond with the geologic record; and whether the _days_ of the retrospective prophecy of creation are to be regarded as coextensive with the vast periods of the geologist, or as merely representative portions of them, or as literal days of twenty-four hours each? But though we thus seek to harmonize the two records, we continue to regard their grounds and objects as entirely different. The object of geology is simply the elucidation of the history of the earth, and of the story of its various creations; and its grounds are, like those of astronomy or geography, or of any other physical science, facts and inferences scientifically determined or deduced; while, on the other hand, the grounds of the Mosaic record are those on which the other Scriptures rest, and which have been so well laid down in what we may term the higher literature of the "Evidences," while at least some of its objects,--for who shall declare them all?--seem to be, first, to establish the all-important fact of the Divine authorship of the universe, and to show that all its various forces are not self-existent, but owe their origin to a Great First Cause; next, to exhibit the progressive character of God's workings,--a character which equally applies to his works of creation and providence; and, in the third place, to furnish a basis and precedent, in the Divine example, for that institution of the Sabbath which bears not only a prophetic reference to the great dynasty to come,--last of all the dynasties, and of which re-created men are to be the happy subjects, and the Divine Man the adorable Monarch,--but which has also been specially established in order that right preparation may be made for the terminal state which it symbolizes and foreshadows. Here, as certainly as in the other physical sciences, the line has been drawn with perfect precision between what man could and what he could not have known of himself. What he could have known, and in part already knows, is geologic science; what in all probability he never could have known is the fact of the Divine authorship of the universe, and the true nature of the institution of the Sabbath, as a time of preparation for the final state, and as alike representative of God's workings in the past, and of his eternally predetermined scheme for the future. "Is it not certain," Socrates is represented as inquiring, in "the first Alcibiades," of his gay and confident pupil, "that you know nothing but what has been told you by others, or what you have found out for yourself?" There is at once exquisite simplicity and great terseness in this natural division of the only modes in which men can acquire knowledge; and we find it wonderfully exemplified in all revelation. Scripture draws practically a broad line between the two modes; and while it tells man all that is necessary to his wants and welfare as a religious creature, it does not communicate to him a single scientific fact which he is competent to find out for himself.

About an age previous to the times of Turrettine, the danger of "corrupting philosophy through an intermixed divinity" was admirably shown by Bacon in his "Novum Organum;" and the line indicated was exactly what we now find was laid down of old with such precision in Scripture. "To deify error and to adore vain things," said the great philosopher, "may be well accounted the plague of the understanding. Some modern men, guilty of much levity, have so indulged this vanity, that they have essayed to find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other places of holy writ, seeking the living among the dead. Now this vanity is so much the more to be checked and restrained, because, by unadvised mixture of Divine and human things, not only a phantastical philosophy is produced, but also an heretical religion. Therefore it is safe to give unto Faith, with a sober mind, the things that are Faith's." The passage, partially quoted, has been not unfrequently misapplied, as if it bore, not against theologians such as Turrettine and the Franciscans, but against theologians such as Chalmers, Dr. Bird Sumner, and Dr. Pye Smith,--not against the men who derive a false science from Scripture, into which God never introduced natural science of any kind, but against the men who, having sought and acquired their science where it is alone to be found, have striven to bring Scripture, in the misinterpreted passages, into harmony with its findings. Taken, however, as a whole, its true meaning is obvious. It is the men who have "essayed to find natural philosophy" positively revealed in Genesis and the other sacred books,--not the men who have merely shown that there is nothing in Scripture which conflicts with the natural philosophy legitimately found elsewhere,--that are obnoxious to the censure conveyed in the remark. It is they only, and not the others, that are "_phantastical_" in their philosophy and "_heretical_" in their religion. I say heretical in their religion. The Ptolemaic doctrine which ascribed to the earth a central place in the universe was only scientifically false, whereas the same doctrine in Turrettine and the Franciscans, from the circumstance that they pledged the Scripture to its falsity, and professed to derive it direct from revelation, was not only scientifically false, but a heresy to boot. And, in like manner, it is the class who term themselves the "Mosaic geologists,"--men such as the Granville Penns, Moses Stewarts, Eleazar Lords, Dean Cockburns, and Peter Macfarlanes,--who essay to "find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis," and that too a demonstrably false natural philosophy, who are obnoxious to the Baconian censure now. No true geologist ever professes to deduce his geology from Scripture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous systems, always invariable in their order, and its successive groups of fossil remains, always (in accordance with their place and age) of a certain determinable character,--not in a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to teach any natural science as such,--that he derives the materials with which he builds. Had there been no Divine Revelation, geology would be as certainly what it now is as either geography or astronomy. That it comes in the present time more in contact with revealed truth than either of these sciences, is, as I have shown, merely a consequence of the fact that there is a history given in the opening passages of Scripture, for far other than geological purposes, of the authorship of the heavens and earth, and of the successive stages of creation; and further, from the circumstance that, from various motives, men are ever and anon inquiring how the geologic agrees with the Scriptural record. It may be well here to remind the anti-geologists, in connection with this part of my subject, of what at the utmost they may hope to accomplish. Judging from all I have yet seen of their writings, they seem to be as certainly impressed by the belief that they are settling textually the geologic question of the world's antiquity, as the doctors of Salamanca held that they were settling textually the question of the world's form; or Turrettine and the Franciscans, that they were settling textually the question of the world's motion, or rather want of motion. But the mistake is quite as gross in their case as in that of Turrettine and the doctors. Geology rests on a broad, ever extending basis of evidence, wholly independent of the revelation on which they profess, very unintelligently, in all the instances I have yet known, to found their objections. What they need at most promise themselves is, to defeat those attempts to reconcile the two records which are made by geologists who respect and believe the Scripture testimony,--not a very laudable feat, even could it be accomplished, and certainly worthy of being made rather a subject of condolence than of congratulation. And though, of course, men should pursue the truth simply for its own sake, and independently either of the consequences which it may be found to involve, or of the company with which it may bring them acquainted, the anti-geologists might be worse employed than in scanning the character and aims of the associates with whom they virtually league themselves when they declare war against the Christian geologist.

There are three different parties in the field, either directly opposed, or at least little friendly, to the men who honestly attempt reconciling the Mosaic with the geologic record. First, there are the anti-geologists,--men who hold that geological questions are to be settled now as the Franciscans contemporary with Galileo held that astronomical questions were to be settled in the seventeenth century, or as the doctors of Salamanca contemporary with Columbus held that geographic questions were to be settled in the fifteenth. And _they_ believe that geology, as interpreted by the geologists, is entirely false, because, as they think, irreconcilable with Scripture; further, that our planet had no existence some seven or eight thousand years ago,--that the apparent antiquity of the various sedimentary systems and organic groups of the earth's crust is wholly illusive,--and that the very oldest of them cannot be more than a few days older than the human period. In fine, just as it was held two centuries ago by Turrettine and the Franciscans, that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ was the only legitimate authority in astronomic questions, so this class now hold that the Bible as interpreted by _them_ is the only legitimate authority in geologic questions; and further, that the Bible being, as they contend, wholly opposed to the deductions of the geologist, these deductions must of necessity be erroneous. Next, there is a class, more largely represented in society than in literature, who, looking at the general bearings of the question, the character and standing of the geologists, and the sublime nature of their discoveries, believe that geology ranks as certainly among the sciences as astronomy itself; but who, little in earnest in their religion, are quite ready enough, when they find theologians asserting the irreconcilability of the geologic doctrines with those of Scripture, to believe them; nay, not only so, but to repeat the assertion. It is not fashionable in the present age openly to avow infidelity, save mayhap in some modified rationalistic or pantheistic form; but in no age did the thing itself exist more extensively; and the number of individuals is very great who, while they profess an outward respect for revelation, have no serious quarrel with the class who, in their blind zeal in its behalf, are in reality undermining its foundations. Nor are there avowed infidels awanting who also make common cause with the party so far as to assert that the results of geologic discovery conflict irreconcilably with the Mosaic account of creation. But there is yet another class, composed of respectable and able men, who, from the natural influence of their acquirements and talents, are perhaps more dangerous allies still, and whom we find represented by writers such as Mr. Babbage and the Rev. Baden Powell. It is held by both these accomplished men, that it is in vain to attempt reconciling the Mosaic writings with the geologic discoveries: both are intimately acquainted with the evidence adduced by the geologist, and entertain no doubt whatever regarding what it establishes; but though in the main friendly to at least the moral sanctions of the New Testament, both virtually set aside the Mosaic cosmogony; the one (Mr. Babbage) on the professed grounds that we really cannot arrive with any certainty at the meaning of that old Hebrew introduction to the Scriptures in which the genesis of things is described; and the other (Mr. Powell) on the assumption that that introduction is but a mere picturesque myth or parable, as little scientifically true as the parables of our Saviour or of Nathan the seer are historically so. Now, I cannot think that the anti-geologists are quite in the place in which they either ought or intend to be when engaged virtually in making common cause with either of these latter classes.[35]

Be this as it may, however, it may be not uninstructive, and perhaps not wholly unamusing, to examine what the claims really are of some of our later anti-geologists to be recognized as the legitimate and qualified censors of geologic fact or inference. It will be seen, that in the passage which I have quoted from Turrettine, the theologian, in three of his five divisions, restricts himself to the theologic province, and that when in his own proper sphere even his errors are respectable; but that in the two concluding divisions he passes into the province of the natural philosopher, and that there his respectability ceases for the time, and he becomes eminently ridiculous. The anti-geologists,--men of considerably smaller calibre than the massive Dutch divine of the seventeenth century,--also enter into a field not their own. Passing from the theologic province, they obtrude into that of the geologist, and settle against him, apparently after a few minutes' consideration, or as mere special pleaders, questions on which he has been concentrating the patient study and directing the laborious explorations of years. And an exhibition by specimen of the nonsense to which they have in this way committed themselves in their haste, may not be wholly uninstructive. But I must defer the display till another evening. I shall do them no injustice; but I trust it will be forgiven me should I exhibit, as they have exhibited themselves, a class of writers to whose assaults I have submitted for the last fourteen years without provocation and without reply.

LECTURE TENTH.

THE GEOLOGY OF THE ANTI-GEOLOGISTS.

It has been well remarked, that that writer would be equally in danger of error who would assign very abstruse motives for the conduct of great bodies of men, or very obvious causes for the great phenomena of nature. The motives of the masses,--on a level always with the average comprehension,--are never abstruse; the causes of the phenomena, on the other hand, are never obvious. And when these last are hastily sought after, not from any devotion to scientific truth, or any genuine love of it, but for some purpose of controversy, we may receive it as a sure and certain fact that they will not be found. Some mere plausibility will be produced instead, bearing on its front an obviousness favorable mayhap to its reception for the time by the vulgar, but in reality fatal to its claims in the estimate of all deep thinkers; while truth will meanwhile lie concealed far below, in the bottom of her well, until patiently solicited forth by some previously unthought of process, in the character of some wholly unanticipated result. Such, in the history of science, has been the course and character of error on the one hand, and of actual discovery on the other: the error has been always comparatively obvious,--the discovery unexpected and abstruse. And as men descend in the scale of accomplishment or intellect, a nearer and yet nearer approximation takes place between their conceptions of the causes of the occult processes of nature, and the common and obvious motives which influence large masses of their fellows; until at length the sublime contrivances of the universe sink, in their interpretation of them, into the clumsy expedients of a bungling mechanism.

Tested by their reading of the phenomena on this principle, we find curious gradations between the higher and the humbler orders of minds. The vortices of Descartes, for instance, involve but a simple idea, that might have been struck out by almost any individual of a tolerably lively fancy, who had walked by the side of a winding river, and seen sticks and straws revolving in its eddies. But no fancy, however active, or no reach of mere common sense, however respectable, could have originated, or conducted to a successful conclusion, that profound contemplation into which Newton fell in the garden of Woolsthorpe, when he saw the loosened apple drop from the tree, and succeeded in demonstrating that the planets are retained in their orbits by the same law which impels a falling pebble towards the ground. So little obvious, indeed, was the Newtonian scheme, that most of the contemporary generation of philosophers,--some of them, such as Fontenelle and his brother academicians of France, men of no mean standing,--died rejecting it. And the objections of Turrettine to the motion of the earth on its axis are, we find, still more obvious than even the idea of the vortices. It does at first seem natural enough to suppose, that if the earth's surface be speeding eastwards at the rate of several hundred miles in the hour (a thousand miles at the equator), the birds which flutter over it should be somewhat in danger of being left behind; and that atoms and down flakes floating in the atmosphere in a time of calm, instead of appearing, as they often do, either in a state of rest, or moving with equal freedom in every direction, ought to be seen hurrying westwards, as if puffed by the breath of a tornado. Such an objection must for a time have appeared as just as it seems obvious, especially in one's study on a Saturday night, with much of one's lecture still to write, and the Sabbath too near to permit of verification or experiment. Fontenelle, however, though he could not get over the difficulty of conceiving how the same gravitation which made a stone fall also kept the moon in its place, fairly surmounted that which puzzled Turrettine; and in his "Plurality of Worlds,"--a publication of the same age as the "Compendium Theologica,"--he makes his Marchioness surmount it too. "'But I have a difficulty to solve,' he represents the lady as saying, 'and you must be serious. As the earth moves, the air changes every moment; so we breathe the air of another country.' 'Not at all,' replied I; 'for the air which encompasses the earth follows with us, and turns with us. Have you not seen the labors of the silkworm? The shell or cocoon which it weaves around itself with so much art is of a down very loose and soft; and so the earth, which is solid, is covered, from the surface twenty leagues upwards, with a kind of down, which is the air, and, like the shell of the silkworm, turns along with it.'" Even Turrettine, however, was as far in advance of some of our contemners of science in the present day, as Fontenelle was in advance of Turrettine, or Newton in advance of Fontenelle. The old theologian could scarce have held, with a living ecclesiastic of the Romish Church in Ireland, Father Cullen, that the sun is _possibly_ only a fathom in diameter; or have asserted with a most Protestant lecturer who addressed an audience in Edinburgh little more than three years ago, that, though God created all the wild animals, it was the devil who made the flesh-eaters among them fierce and carnivorous; and, of course, shortened their bowels, lengthened their teeth, and stuck formidable claws into the points of their digits.[36] Further, the error of Turrettine was but that of his age, whereas our modern decriers of scientific fact and inference are always men greatly in the rear of theirs, and as far inferior to the ancient assertors of the same errors as the few untutored peasants and fishermen of our own time, located in remote parts of the country, who still retain the old faith in witchcraft, are inferior to the great lawyers, poets, and divines,--the Fairfaxes, Henry Mores, Judge Haleses, and Sir George Mackenzies,--who in the seventeenth century entertained a similar belief. And so it may seem somewhat idle work to take any pains in "scattering" such a "rear of darkness thin" as this forlorn phalanx composes. "Let them alone," said a lunatic in the lucid fit, to a soldier who had told him, when asked why he carried a sword, that it was to kill his enemies,--"let them alone, and they will all die of themselves." But though very inconsiderable, there is a comparatively large proportion of the class perilously posted, on both sides of the Atlantic, in what used to be termed of old in Scotland "the chair of verity;" and there they sometimes succeed in doing harm, all unwittingly, not to the science which they oppose, but to the religion which they profess to defend. I was not a little struck lately by finding in a religious periodical of the United States, a worthy Episcopalian clergyman bitterly complaining, that whenever his sense of duty led him to denounce from his pulpit the gross infidelity of modern geology, he could see an unbelieving grin rising on the faces of not a few of his congregation. Alas! who can doubt that such ecclesiastics as this good clergyman must virtually be powerful preachers on the skeptical side, to all among their people who, with intelligence enough to appreciate the geologic evidence, are still unsettled in their minds respecting that of the Christian faith. And so on this consideration alone it may be found not uninstructive to devote the address of the present evening to an exposure of the errors and nonsense of our modern anti-geologists,--the true successors and representatives, in the passing age, of the Franciscan and Salamanca doctors of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Let me first remark, that no one need expect to be original simply by being absurd. There is a cycle in nonsense, as certainly as in opinion of a more solid kind, which ever and anon brings back the delusions and errors of an earlier time: the follies of the present day are transcripts, unwittingly produced, and with of course a few variations, of follies which existed centuries ago; and it seems to be on this principle,--a consequence, mayhap, of the limited range of the human mind, not only in its elucidations of truth, but also in its forms of error,--that scarce an explanation of geologic phenomena has been given by the anti-geologists of our own times, that was not anticipated by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was held, for instance,--in opposition to the great painter, Leonardo da Vinci, who flourished early in the sixteenth century, and was one of the first who, after the revival of learning, asserted the true character of organic remains,--that fossils were formed in the rocks through the planetary influences, or a certain plastic force in nature, and had never entered into the composition of living creatures or plants. And this view obtained very generally till about the middle of the seventeenth century, when, save for a brief space long after, in the times of Voltaire, it ceased to be regarded as any longer tenable. Curiously enough, however, it was virtually reproduced by one of the extant anti-geologists,--a clergyman of the English Church,--only three years ago, in a publication written, he says, to counteract "the immense mischief occasioned by the infidel works of geologists, _especially among the lower classes_," and which he has termed "a brief and complete refutation" of their "anti-scriptural theory."[37] "Fossils," says this courageous writer, "were not necessarily animated structures:" some of them were in all probability "formed of stone from the very first;" others, of inanimate flesh and bone. "The mammoth found under the ice in arctic regions had not necessarily been a living creature: it was created under the ice, and then preserved in that peculiar form of preservation, instead of being transmuted into stone, like the rest of its class." Such was the state of keeping of this famous mammoth, when discovered a little ere the beginning of the present century, that, as I had occasion formerly to remark, dogs and bears fed upon its flesh; and its bones, and part of its skin, covered with long red hair, are now in the museum of Petersburg. But there is no evidence whatever, according to this writer, that it had ever been a living creature: it was simply a created carcass. All organisms are, he holds, models or archetypes, fashioned during the first day in the depths of chaos, to typify or foreshadow the living plants and animals that were to be called into existence a few days later. "What," he asks, "do the cocoa-nuts, melons, and gourds, which have been found in the strata, show, but that the vegetable had its perfect archetype in chaos as well as the animal?" Nay, further, the geologist has but got into the apartment in which the original architect stored up his plans and models,--many of them, however, rejected ones. For "though every animal is formed after his archetype," we find him saying, "the converse is not true, that every chaotic structure is represented by its living _facsimile_." But they typify, if not living organisms, much more important things,--"they represent," says our writer, "the land of the shadow of death;" and the strata containing them, which geologists have opened, are symbolical of the "gates of death." "The state of preservation in which most fossils are, instead of having mouldered away, foreshadows immortality. The gradation, too, from the organisms whose types are _said to be_ lost or destroyed, and confused in innumerable heaps, up to the perfect and complete specimen, is no fanciful representation of the resurrection; while the isolated bones and parts of skeletons which, though found far apart, as they were created, have been fitted together by the skill of the accomplished anatomist, give assurance of the fact that our scattered dust--our _membra disjecta_--shall come together at the sound of the last trump." And this is "geology on Scripture principles," soberly expounded by a man who respects facts, while he gives no place to fancy.

The "English clergyman" then goes on to show in his pamphlet, that the Coal Measures furnish no evidence of the earth's antiquity. They were formed, he says, by the finger of the Creator, "immediately and at once. A carboniferous tree of gigantic size has been discovered," he adds, "in the interior of the earth, of such a shape as entirely to prove the absurdity of a theory [that of the earth's antiquity] which has not a single valid argument to support it. It is described as having its trunk rising from the earth perpendicularly ten feet, and then bending over and extending horizontally sixty feet. Now, what living tree thus lopsided could support such a weight in such a direction? It seems to have been _created on purpose to silence the_ HORRID BLASPHEMIES _of geologists_; for it proves to a demonstration, that the upper, nether, and surrounding matter came into existence with it at the same instant; for how else could it have been preserved in such a position?" The triumph secured by the carboniferous tree, however,--though it does not seem wholly impossible that a tree might in any age of the world have been broken over some ten feet from its root, and bent in a horizontal position,--seems in some danger of being neutralized, as we read on, by the circumstance that geologists find not unfrequently, among their fossils, the dung of the carnivorous vertebrates, charged in many instances with the teeth, bones, and scales of the creatures on which they had preyed, and strongly impressed, in at least the coprolites of the larger Palaeozoic ganoids, and of the enaliosaurs of the Secondary period, by the screw-like markings of a spiral intestine, similar in form to that now exemplified by the sharks and rays. And in maintaining his hypothesis that most fossils are mere archetypes--mere plans or models--of existences to be, the archetypal dung proves rather a stumbling-block, and the English clergyman waxes exceedingly wroth against the geologists. "We cannot," he says, "believe in such things as coprolites. They are only a curious form of matter commanded by Him who has made the flower to assume all shapes as well as all hues. He who would not allow so much as a tool to be lifted up on the stones that composed his altar, would certainly not allow the _work_ of animals to compose his creation, much less, then, their dung. The geological assertion that the Creator of this world formed it in some parts of coprolites savors very much of Satan or Beelzebub, the god of dung. Geologists could scarcely have made a more unfortunate self-refuting assertion than this." I question, however, whether the clergyman does well to be angry with the geologists here. That fossils are mere models and archetypes, is _his_ hypothesis, not theirs; and so it is he himself who is answerable, not they, for what he deems the impiety of the archetypal dung. His next statement is of a kind suited somewhat to astonish the practical geologist. "_It is the constant language of geologists_," he says, in giving the result of their discoveries, "_that no young have been found!!!_ while the larger fossils have been detected isolated, or in the company of others, all differing in kind." "Archetypal resemblances of ova have been found, and such things as _moths_; but these are distinct and perfect in their kind. The occurrence of the young, which are imperfect, is a fact which has not been, and never can be, established; _therefore it never can be proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years_." It is "the constant language of geologists" that "no young have been found" in the fossil state. Amazing assertion! "Therefore it never can be proved that this world has had a longer existence than six thousand years." Astonishing inference! There is not a tyro in geology who ever looked over a set of fossils, or ever spent an hour in exploring a fossiliferous deposit, who does not know that the remains of organisms in every stage of growth may be found lying side by side in the same bed,--that almost every museum contains its series of molluscs, crustaceans, fishes, and corals, formed to illustrate species in their various stages of growth,--that, in especial, among the ammonites of the Secondary ages, and the trilobites of the Palaeozoic ones, these series have been made with great care, in order to prevent the erroneous multiplication of species,--and that, in short, every richly fossiliferous stratum in the earth's crust repeats the lesson so often deduced from our churchyards, where graves of all sizes, from that of the infant of a day to that of the aged adult, may be found lying side by side. What the English clergyman represents as "the constant language of geologists," is a language which _no_ geologist ever yet used, or ever will. And his inference is in every way worthy of his premises. The flourish with which he concludes his pamphlet would be infinitely amusing had his language been just a little less solemn. "The writer of the above remarks has felt it his duty," we find him saying, "to publish them, not only to refute the arguments of the vain and puffed-lip geologist, who fancies himself wiser than God, but also to prevent, by God's blessing, the evil that must ensue from tampering with the sacred text. And now, what has Satan to say? Why, THE TABLES ARE TURNED. Let men beware. Why did not the British Association, at their twenty-third meeting, in September, 1853, acknowledge their error as a body, in applauding so loudly the assertion of one of their geological members at a previous meeting, that this earth existed ages before man? They may now have the satisfaction of thinking that, in spite of themselves, those impious plaudits have been turned by the wrath of God into hisses." Strange as the fact may seem, this passage was written, not in grave joke, but in serious earnest.

The belief that fossil remains had never entered into the composition of living organisms, but had been formed in the rocks just as we find them, gradually gave place, during the seventeenth century, to the belief that they were the debris of the Noachian Deluge, and evidences, as they occurred in almost every known country, and were found on the top of lofty hills, of at once its universality and the height to which its waters had prevailed. And this hypothesis, like the others, has been reproduced by some of the anti-geologists of the present day. The known fact,--a result of modern science,--that the several formations (always invariable in their order of succession) have their groups of organisms peculiar to themselves, has, however, interposed a difficulty from which the earlier cosmogonists were exempt. It has become necessary to show that the Noachian cataclysm was strangely selective, in burying in the beds which it is held by the class to have formed, now one group of plants and animals, now quite another group, and anon yet another and different group still; and all this many times repeated with such nice care and discrimination, that not a single organism of the lower beds is to be detected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of either the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. Even this task, however, just a little lightened by here and there a suppression of the facts, has been attempted by the redoubtable Dean of York.[38] Fire and water were, he conceives, equally agents in the great catastrophe that destroyed the old world,--a circumstance which, if true, would have furnished with an admirable apology the class of persons who, according to the wit, would have cried out "Fire, fire," at the deluge. The dean conceives that at the commencement of the Flood, when torrents of rain were falling upon the land, numerous submarine volcanoes began to disgorge their molten contents into the sea, destroying the fish, and all other marine productions, by the intensity of the heat, and at the same time locking them up in strata formed of the erupted matter. This process took place ere the land floods, laden with the spoils of island and continent, and the accompanying mud and sand, could arrive at the remoter depths; which, however, they ultimately reached, and formed a second formation, overlying the first. There were thus two formations originated,--a marine formation below, and a terrestrial or fresh water formation above; but as these two deposits could not be made to include all the geological phenomena with which even the dean was acquainted, he had nicely to parcel out the work of his volcanoes on the one hand, and that of his land floods on the other, into separate fits or paroxysms, each of which served to entomb a distinct class of creatures, and originate a definite set of rocks. Thus, the first work of his volcanoes was to form the Transition series of strata. As a commencement of the whole, the internal fire blew up from the bed of the ocean, in tremendous explosions, vast quantities of pulverized rock mixed with clay, which, slowly subsiding, and covering up, as it sank, shells, stone-lilies, and trilobites, formed the Silurian rocks. A second explosion brought up the vents of the volcanoes to the level of the ocean; and while the Old Red Sandstone, thus produced, and charged with fish killed by the heat, was settling on their flanks, they themselves, as if seized by black vomit, began to disgorge in vast quantities, coal in the liquid state. Very opportunely, just ere it cooled, enormous quantities of vegetables, washed out to sea by the extraordinary land floods, were precipitated immediately over it; and, sticking in its viscid surface, or sinking into its substance through cracks formed in it during the cooling, they became attached to it in such considerable masses, as to lead long after to the very mistaken notion that coal itself was of vegetable origin. Then there ensued another deposit of red sand, with salt boiled into it; and then a deposition of lime and clay. The land floods still continuing, the great Sauroid reptiles which had haunted the rivers and lower plains began to yield to their force, and their carcasses, floating out to sea, sank amid the slowly subsiding lime and clay, now known as the Lias. The volcanoes too were still very active; and the lighter shells, ammonites, and the like, which had been previously bobbing up and down on the boiling surface, now sank by myriads; for the viscid argillaceous mud thrown up by the fiery ebullitions from beneath stuck fast to them, and dragged them down. Then came the formation of the Oolite, rolled into little egg-like pellets by the waves; and last of all, the Green sand and Chalk; after which the waters ran off, and sank into the deep hollow which now forms the bed of the ocean, but which previous to the cataclysm had been the place of the land. The dean, as he went on, fell into some little confusion regarding the true place of some of his animals, such as the megatherium, which arrived in his arrangement a little too soon. He spoke, too--if a newspaper report is to be credited--of a heavy creature soon overtaken and drowned by the rising waters, which he termed the _pterogactylus_, and which does not seem to have turned up, either in the body or out of it, since it was lost on that memorable occasion. Nor did he make any provision in his arrangement for the formation of the various Tertiary deposits. But then all these are slight matters, that could be very easily woven into his hypothesis. As the flood rose along the hill sides, first such of the weightier animals would perish as could not readily climb steep acclivities; and then the oxen, the horses, the deer, and the goats, with the lighter carnivora, who, as they would die last,--some of them not until the final disappearance of the hill-tops,--would of course be entombed in the upper deposits. Such is the hypothesis of the Dean of York,--a hypothesis of which it may be justly affirmed, that it is well nigh as ingenious as the circumstances of the case permit, and against which little else can be urged than that it must seem rather cumbrous and fanciful to the class who do not know geology, and, on the whole, somewhat inadequate to the class who do.

The Flood, however, is not left to do the whole geologic work, by even such of the anti-geologists as assign to it the largest share. A great unrecorded convulsion which accompanied the Fall is held by some of their number to have greatly assisted, by laying down the older formations of the fossiliferous rocks; and very much is said to have been done during the extended antediluvian period that succeeded it. One of perhaps the most amusing though least known of the writers that take this special view is a Scotchman, resident in a secluded provincial town, who for the last twelve or fifteen years has been printing ingenious little books against the infidel geologists, and getting letters of similar character inserted in such of our country newspapers as are ambitious of rendering their science equal to their literature. And from the great trouble which he has taken with the writings of the individual who now addresses you, he seems to regard them as peculiarly unsolid and dangerous. According to this profound cosmogonist, the world before the Fall was rather more than twice its present size, and very artificially constructed.[39] It was a hollow ball, supported inside by a framework of metal wrought into hexagonal reticulations, somewhat like the framework of the great iron bridge over the river Wear at Sunderland; and which had an open space in its centre, occupied by a vast tubular furnace lying direct south and north, which threw out huge volumes of flame towards the poles. Over the reticulated framework there rose a great, thick _firmament_ of metal, which formed the inner shell of the globe; over the metal there lay a considerably thicker shell of granite; and over the granite, a thinner shell of a substance not specified, perhaps not known, but which, from its being completely water-tight, served the purpose of the layer of asphalt or _terra cotta_ which the architect spreads over his flat roofs, or on the tops of his sloping terraces, afterwards to be covered with soil and laid out into gardens. Such, it seems, was that portion of the framework of our great globe which corresponded to the hollow lath and plaster framework of the little globes used in schools; while its uppermost layer,--correspondent with the slips of the map which the geographer pastes on the model and then varnishes,--was formed of earth and water, economically laid out into "most useful and tasteful configurations,"--the earth into pretty little rising grounds and valleys, and the water into seas and lakes of no great extent, but which formed, from their very handsome combinations, "a terraqueous surface all over PERFECTLY PARADISAICAL." Over this exquisitely neat earth there lay an enveloping atmosphere, greatly thinner and less dense than the air at present is, and incapable, in consequence, of being agitated by storms; while directly over the northern and southern extremities of the world the polar auroras, now so fitful and broken, extended in a permanent arch, and gave light, during the long dark winters, to the regions lying below. And as warmth was as necessary to the paradisaical perfection of these districts as light, they received the necessary heat from the great double-acting furnace in the interior, which, belching out flames at both ends, acted powerfully against the polar portions of the metallic crust or shell, and thus maintained the necessary glow in the absence of the sun, on the principle on which a frying-pan or Scotch _girdle_ is heated when placed by the cookmaid over the fire. And such, according to this excellent world-fashioner and very zealous man, was the construction of that unblighted and unbroken earth which was of old pronounced to be "very good." The Fall, however, produced a most remarkable and singularly disastrous change. The earth was somehow partially crushed and broken, contemporaneously with the event,--like a strong fishing basket when it accidentally falls from a coach-top under the wheel; and, from a most interesting colored copperplate that illustrates one of the author's treatises (for he draws as well as he writes), the exact damage which it received can be minutely estimated. The interior network was compressed into all sorts of irregular polygons; the iron firmament was broken into great fragments,--some of which may be seen in the print hanging down into the hollow interior, like patches of broken plaster dangling from a ceiling, suspended by the hairs originally employed to give the necessary tenacity to the lime. The great granitic shell was also broken, but broken so nicely, on the principle of the arch, that the pieces remained in nearly their original places. Finally, vast rents are seen to occur in the cement and soil of the outer crust; and these great rents, which must have formed enormous gulfs and deep interminable ravines, were destined, it would seem, to perform a most important part in the future geology of the globe. Forming impassable lines of demarcation between the several portions into which they broke up the earth's surface, they imprisoned the recently created animals in separate groups, kept as completely from mixing together as the fallow-deer of one loftily-walled park are kept from mixing with the white oxen of another loftily-walled park, or as the kangaroos or duck-billed quadrupeds of Australia are kept by the surrounding ocean from mixing with the tigers of Sumatra or the tortoises of Madagascar. I employ the writer's own happy illustration:--"In some places these fragments" of the earth's crust "would be piled more or less above each other, and in others quite detached and isolated, like fragments of ice on the bank of a river after a thaw." They would of course be on very different levels, each having, as I have said, a distinct group of animals of its own; and when, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, the great catastrophe of the Flood came on, it would necessarily find, as it rose along the levels, and submerged platform after platform in succession, a different and yet different set of creatures to kill. To borrow from the description of this ingenious cosmogonist, "those on the lower fragments would be first engulphed, and their races completely extinguished from off the surface, and deposited in the earth; then those on higher and higher upwards, till the whole became submerged. And we have only to suppose that man, with the present survivors, were those that occupied one of the higher table-lands when the Flood commenced (and of course in that case Noah could collect into the ark only out of those of his own country); then the result would be, that man and his present contemporaries would be among the last overwhelmed. This will sufficiently account for the fact of his and their remains not being found deep in the earth....

"The two most interesting geological facts therefore, namely, that distinct organisms are to be found in distinct formations respectively; and secondly, _that no remains of man, and few or none of the other races at present surviving, are to be found in any but comparatively recent formations,_--these two grand facts of geology, we say, instead of pointing back to vast cycles of ages before the creation, seem to point merely to the peculiar physical circumstances of the fallen planet in the interval between those two eventful stages in its history, the Fall and Flood, and the natural consequences of these circumstances in causing distinct divisions, and some of these of different elevations, among the organic living creatures, during the interval." One other circumstance completes this really original and beautiful hypothesis. The cosmogonist holds that the Flood,--no mere tranquil rising of the waters, as some suppose,--was accompanied by terrible convulsions, which reduced to utter ruin the already shattered earth. The granitic dome fell inwards upon the central furnace; and the fires, bursting outwards under the enormous pressure, found vent at the surface, and made the volcanoes. And this collapsed and diminished world,--scarce half the bulk of the old one,--with no heating furnace under its polar regions, nor aught save the merest tatters of an aurora flitting occasionally over them,--greatly too dense in itself, and surrounded by a greatly too dense atmosphere,--with its huge mountains, vast oceans, wide steppes, and arid deserts, with its snows, its frosts, its drenching rains, its horrible tempests, its terrible thunder storms, and devastating earthquakes,--all alike frightful defects, not in the original plan,--is not only unlike the primeval world, not very good, or, unlike the antediluvian world, tolerably good, but not good at all. "On taking a bird's-eye view of the geographical and hydrographical features or superficies of the globe," says this bold writer, "any unprejudiced person must at once admit, that in either of these departments there is scarce a trace of that beautiful, tasteful, and economical design which we have a right to expect from the admitted qualities of the great Author, and his avowed object in the structure and report of it when newly finished." It is added, however, that "its _present object_, as the _Siberia_--the penal settlement--of expatriated rebels, it is in its _present state_ well calculated to fulfil."

It may be worth mentioning, that the writer who sets himself after a fashion so peculiar to assert and justify the ways of Providence against the geologists resides in one of the loveliest districts in Scotland,--a district, however, shaggy with rock, and overshadowed by great mountains, and occasionally visited by earthquake tremors, and both snow and thunder storms, and so, with all its wild beauty to other eyes, merely, I must suppose, one of the rougher districts of the penal Siberia in his. He is, indeed, particularly severe upon mountains; though not, as he tells us, wholly devoid of a lurking prejudice in their favor. But what weak prejudice might palliate or plead for, his better judgment condemns. "See," says this judicious writer, "vast districts of the globe disfigured by tremendous masses of rugged and almost barren mountains.... What, cry some, would you bury as deformities the lofty peak and rugged mountain brow, nature's palaces,--generally the grandest and most sublime objects in natural scenery! We cordially assure the reader we are by no means prejudiced against these grand objects; _for if prejudice we have on the subject, it is rather on the other side_. It is therefore the force of evidence alone makes us,--reluctantly we admit,--give up these to rank among the derangements and deformities of nature. She, according to her usual _taste_ and _economy_, would never be at the expense of rearing, and that upon ground _that might have otherwise been much better occupied_, such unwieldy, useless masses of matter, merely for the sake of gratifying the taste for grandeur and sublimity in a few of her sons, nor, indeed, for any other use we ever heard ascribed to them.... According to _our_ test, a rich and gently undulatory surface, intersected with rivulets and sheets of water, in the places taken up by these elevations, would be far better, as combining in the highest degree the _utile cum dulce_."[40] To such of my audience as are familiar with Dr. Thomas Burnet's "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1684), that revolution in the cycle of hypothesis to which I have referred, and through which the visionaries of the later ages return to the dreams which had occupied the visionaries of an earlier time, must be sufficiently apparent in this passage. For not only does Burnet speak after the same manner of hills and mountains, but also of an idle, ill-founded prejudice entertained in their favor. We find him thus summing up a general survey of the mountains of the globe:--"Look upon these great ranges: in what confusion do they lie! They have neither form nor beauty, nor shape, nor order, no more than the clouds in the air. Then, how barren, how desolate, how naked are they! How they stand neglected by nature! Neither the rains can soften them, nor the dews from heaven make them fruitful. I give this short survey of the mountains of the earth _to help to remove that prejudice we are apt to have_, or that conceit that the present earth is regularly formed.... There is nothing in nature," adds this writer, "more shapeless and ill-figured than an old rock or a mountain."

I leave it to my audience to determine how far this depreciatory view,--whether regarded as that of Dr. Burnet or of the modern anti-geologist,--agrees with the estimate of the higher minds, or whether it manifests the proper respect for the adorable Being who, in his infinite wisdom, made our world what it is. Let me next show that some of even the abler and more respectable anti-geologists exhibit no very profound veneration for the letter of Scripture, when, instead of bearing, as they think, against the deductions of their opponents, they find it directly opposed to fancies of their own. It is held by not a few among them, that at the Deluge the sea and land changed places. When the waters receded, it was found, they allege, that the old land had become ocean, and the old ocean had become land; and as there are certain rivers which are described in Scripture as flowing beside Eden, and which, judging by the names given them, still exist, it has become imperative on the assertors of the hypothesis to show that the rivers which now drain tracts of what they hold was then sea, and that fall into seas which they hold were then land, could not by any possibility have formed the boundaries of the old Adamic garden. Let us mark how Mr. Granville Penn,--certainly one of the most extensively informed of his class,--deals with this difficulty.[41] There are, he argues, certain great corruptions of Scripture. What had been at first written as marginal notes by uninspired men, and were in some cases very erroneous and absurd, came in the course of transcription to be transferred, wholly by mistake, from the side of the page into the body of the text; and thus, in at least a few places, the Scriptures were vitiated, and now declare, instead of Divine truth, what is neither sense nor fact. And on this very general, and certainly most perilous ground, he goes on to argue, unsupported by a single ancient manuscript, and solely on what he terms internal evidence, that the verses in Genesis which conflict with his hypothesis must be regarded as mere idle glosses, ignorantly or surreptitiously introduced into the text by the ancient copyists. "In the second chapter of Genesis," we find him saying, "_there appears an internal critical evidence_ of an insertion of the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th verses, similar to that of the 4th verse of the 5th chapter of St. John, and constituting, in a similar manner, a _parenthesis_ intersecting the thread of the narrative, and introduced solely for a similar purpose of illustration. It does not wear the character of the simple narrative in which it appears, but _of the surcharge of the gloss or note of a later age, founded upon the fanciful traditions then prevailing with respect to the situation of the ancient Paradise_." This certainly is cutting the knot; and, if erected into a precedent by the geologist, would no doubt greatly facilitate the labor of reconciliation. It would, however, be perilous work for _him_. "A wolf," says Plutarch, "peeping into a hut where a company of shepherds were assembled, saw them regaling themselves with a joint of mutton. 'Ye gods!' he exclaimed, 'what a clamor these men would have raised if they had caught _me_ at such a banquet.'" I need scarcely add, that the hypothesis in whose behalf Scripture is thus divested of its authority, and recklessly cast aside, is entirely a worthless one; and that the various continents of the globe, instead of all dating from one period little more than four thousand years back, are of very various ages,--some of them comparatively modern, though absolutely old in relation to human history; and some of so hoar an antiquity, that the term since man appeared upon earth might be employed as a mere unit to measure it by.

It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such strange liberties with a book which he professes to respect, and which he must have had many opportunities of knowing, should take still greater liberties with a science for which he entertains no respect whatever, and of whose first principles he is palpably ignorant. And yet the wild recklessness of some of his explanations of geological phenomena must somewhat astonish all sufficiently acquainted with the science to know that the place and relations of its various formations have been long since determined, and now as certainly form the regulating data of the practical miner, as the places and relations long since determined by the geographer form the regulating data of the practical navigator or engineer. It is as certain, for instance, that the Oolitic system underlies the Green Sand and the Chalk, with all the various formations of the Tertiary division,--Eocene Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene,--as that York is situated to the south of Edinburgh, or that both these cities lie very considerably to the north of London and Paris. And the anti-geologist who would argue, in the heat of controversy, that the Oolite and the Pleistocene were contemporaneous deposits, would be no more worthy of reply than the anti-geographer who would assert, in order to serve some argumentative purpose, that the North Cape lies in the same latitudinal parallel as South California, or that Terra del Fuego is but a day's sailing from Iceland. And yet such, as I intimated on a former evening, is the line taken up by Mr. Granville Penn, in dealing with the difficulties of the Kirkdale Cave, so remarkable for its accumulations of gnawed bones of the Pleistocene ages,--especially for its bones of hyaenas, tigers, bears, wolves, rhinoceroses, and elephants. The cave occurs in the moorlands of Yorkshire, in a limestone rock of that Oolitic division to which the Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag belong, and contains corals and shells that had passed into extinction long even ere the Tertiary period began; while in the cave itself, mixed with bones of the extinct mammals of the geologic age in immediate advance of the present one, there have been found the contemporary remains of animals that still live in our fields and woods, such as the hare, the rabbit, the weasel, and the water rat. And we find Mr. Penn assigning both the Oolitic rock in which the cave is hollowed, and the mammalian remains of the cave itself, equally to the period of the deluge. The limestone existed at that time, it would seem, as a soft calcareous paste, into which the animal remains, floated northwards from intertropical regions on the waters of the Flood, were precipitated in vast quantities, and sank, and then, fermenting under the putrefactive influences, the gas which they formed blow up the yielding lime and mud around them into a long narrow cave, just as a glass-blower blows up a bottle, or as a little yeast blows up into similar but greatly smaller cavities a bit of leaven. And the stalactites and stalagmites which encrust the Kirkdale Cave are, Mr. Penn holds, simply the last runnings of the lime that exuded after the general mass had begun to set. Certainly any one disposed to take such liberties with the Bible on the one hand, and with geologic science on the other, as those taken in the given instances by this most formidable of the anti-geologists, could have but little difficulty in making either Scripture as geological or geology as Scriptural as he had a mind. His chief danger would be that of making the sounder theologians just a little angry, and of escaping, unless quoted for the joke's sake, the notice of the geologists altogether. In truth, the extreme absurdity of our later anti-geologists in virtually contending, in the controversy, that _their_ ignorance of an interesting science, founded on millions of determined facts, ought to be permitted to weigh against the knowledge of the men who have studied it most thoroughly, forms their best defence. It secures them against all save neglect. As, however, some of their number are well meaning men, who would not be ridiculous if they could help it, and only oppose themselves to the geologists because they deem them mischievous and in error, it may be worth while showing them, by an example or two, the ludicrous nature of the positions which in their honest ignorance they permit themselves to occupy, and the real scope and bearing of the arguments which they unwittingly permit themselves to use. I shall adduce two several instances of reasoning, directed by the anti-geologists _against_ their antagonists (as they themselves believed), but which, from their ignorance of the true state of the argument, and of the bearing of the facts with which they dealt, in reality made out for these antagonists as strong a case as they could possibly have made out for themselves. And I am sure that, rather than be found siding with their opponents, the anti-geologists would be content even to acquire a little geology.

I shall select my first instance from the records of the annual controversy which used to rage some ten or fifteen years ago, in sermons, newspapers, and magazines, immediately after every meeting of the British Association. A religious Dublin newspaper,--the "Statesman and Record,"--since extinct, took always an active part in these discussions on the anti-geological side, and boldly affirmed, as in a number now before me, that geology had the devil for its author. A learned correspondent of the paper, who was, however, somewhat more charitable, thought that at least the _facts_ of the science might be exempted from a condemnation so sweeping; nay, that, well interpreted, they might be found decidedly opposed to at least the more mischievous deductions of the geologists; and in illustrating the point, we find him thus arguing, from certain appearances in the valley of the Nile, that the globe which we inhabit cannot possibly be more than six thousand years old.[42] "The valley of the Nile," says this writer, "is known to be covered with a bed of slime which the river has deposited in its periodical inundations, and which rests on a foundation of sand, like that of the adjacent desert. The French savans who accompanied Bonaparte in his Egyptian expedition made several experiments to ascertain the thickness and depth of this superincumbent bed. They dug about two hundred pits, and carefully measured the thickness in the transversal section of the valley, where the deposit had been free from obstacles, and had not been materially increased or lessened by local causes. They found the mean of all these measurements to be six and a half metres, or rather more than twenty feet. M. Gironde endeavored to determine the quantity of slime deposited in a century; and he found that the elevation of soil in that period was rather less than four inches and a half! Dividing the total thickness of the bed by the centenary elevation, he found the quotient 56.50; whence it followed that the inundations had commenced 5650 years before the year 1800, when the experiments were made,--a number which only differed 159 years from the Mosaic date. The difference is not very important, when it is considered that the most trifling error, whether in the measure of the entire superincumbent bed, or in the valuation of the quantity of slime deposited in a century, affects the final results. Notwithstanding this, the coincidence between the sacred historian and the computations of science is remarkable, and furnishes one proof more of the harmony existing between nature and revelation. An honest experimentalist was constrained to arrive at this conclusion at a period when the infidel school of our continental neighbors was in high feather. I am sorry to add, that the result of his own calculation had not that effect on the philosopher himself, or his free-thinking associates, which, for their own sakes, was desirable; but it is no less valuable to us on that account; for we know that an unwilling witness to the truth is worth a score of evidences already prejudiced in its favor."

Now, this is clear, distinct statement; and nothing can be more evident than that the theologian who makes it holds he is reasoning with conclusive effect in behalf of what may be termed the short chronology,--not in its legitimate connection with the recent introduction of the human species, but in its supposed bearing on the age of the earth. And in doing so he commits himself to the apparent positive fact, determined on what may be regarded as geologic data, that the river Nile has been flowing over its bed for about as many years as have elapsed, according to the Hebrew chronology adopted by Usher, since the creation of man, and no more. To the integrity of this inference he pledges himself, as an inference to which the infidel ought to have yielded, as conclusive in its bearing on the question of the earth's age, and as of singular value to the believer who sets himself to deal with the evidences of his faith. Now, without referring to the circumstance that the data on which the French savans under Napoleon founded have since been challenged by geologists, such as Lieutenant Newbold and Sir G. Wilkinson, who have carefully surveyed the rocks and soils of Egypt with the assistance of clearer light than existed at the commencement of the century, let us, for the argument's sake, hold the inference to be quite as good as this theologian regards it. And see, we urge upon him, that you yourself do not suffer it to drop should you find that it commits you to the other side of the argument. Be at least as fair and honest as you say the infidels ought to have been. The six and a half metres of silt and slime,--representative, let us hold, of from five to six thousand years,--rest, you say, on "a foundation of sand like that of the adjacent desert." But have you ascertained on what the sand rests? I know nothing of that, replies the theologian; I had not even thought of that. But the geologist has thought of it, we reply; and has spent much time under the hot sun in ascertaining the point. For nearly three hundred miles,--from the inner boundaries of the delta to within a few hours' journey of the cataracts,--the silt and sand rest on what is known as the "marine" or nummulitic limestone,--a formation of great extent, for it runs into the Nubian desert on the one hand, and into the Libyan desert on the other; and which, though it abounds in the animalcules of the European chalk, is held to belong, in at least its upper beds, which are charged with nummulites, to the earlier Eocene. Over this marine limestone there rests a newer formation, of later Tertiary age, which contains the casts of sea shells, and whole forests of dicotyledonous trees, converted into a flint-like chert; and over all repose the sands and gravels of the desert. Underneath the silt of the river, then, and the sand of the desert, lie these two formations of the Tertiary division. The lower, which is of great thickness, must have been of slow formation. It is composed almost exclusively, in many parts, of microscopic animals, and abounds in others in fossil shells,--nautili, ostreadae, turritella, and nummulites, with corals, sponges, the remains of crustacea, and the teeth of fishes. And between the period of its deposition and that of the formation which rests upon it the surface of what is now Egypt must have been elevated over the surface of the sea, to be covered, in the course of ages, by great forests, which, ere the land assumed its present form and level, were submerged by another oscillation of the surface, and petrified amid beds of a siliceous sand at the bottom of the ocean. Nor is the underlying marine limestone by any means the oldest of the sedimentary rocks of Egypt. It rests on a sandstone of Permian or Triassic age; the sandstone rests, in turn, on the famous Breccia de Verde of Egypt; and the Breccia on a group of Azoic rocks, gneisses, quartzes, mica schists, and clay slates, that wrap round the granitic nucleus of Syene. The formations of Egypt constitute a well-determined part of that great series of systems which compose the upper portion of the earth's crust: its silt is by far the most inconsiderable of its deposits; and if five thousand six hundred and fifty years were exhausted in laying down layer after layer of the twenty feet which form _its_ average thickness, what enormous periods must we not demand in addition for the laying down of the forest formation, of the marine limestone formation, of the New Red Sandstone formation, of the Breccia de Verde formation, and, in short, for the some ten miles of fossiliferous rock of which those deposits form such definite, well-determined portions; besides the time necessary for the production of the enormously developed Azoic rocks which lie under all! The theologian, in this instance, instead of reasoning, as he himself supposed, in behalf of the short chronology, has been making out a very formidable case for the long one; and all that the geologist can have to urge upon him in the circumstances is simply that he should act as he holds the infidel ought to have done, and yield to the force of evidence. I may mention in the passing, that some of the most ancient buildings of Egypt are formed of the Tertiary marine limestones of the country; the stones of the pyramids are charged with nummulites, known to the Arabs as "Pharaoh's beans;" and these organisms stand out in high relief on the weathered portions of the Great Sphinx. Some of the oldest things in the world in their relation to human history,--erections, many of which had survived the memory of their founders even in the days of Herodotus,--are formed of materials so modern in their relation to the geologic epochs, that they had no existence as rock until after the Palaeozoic and Secondary ages had gone by. Not only the Carboniferous sandstone of the High Church and Parliament House of Edinburgh, but even the Oolitic (that is, Portland stone) of Somerset House and St. Paul's, are of an antiquity incalculably vast compared with the stone out of which the oldest of the pyramids were fashioned.

The second example which I shall adduce is one with which many of my auditors must be already familiar. The Falls of Niagara are gradually eating their way through an elevated tract of table-land, upwards towards Lake Erie, at the rate of about fifty yards in forty years; and it has been argued by Sir Charles Lyell, that as they are now seven miles distant from Queenston, where the elevation of the plateaux begins, they must have taken about ten thousand years to scoop out their present deep channel through that space.[43] Ten thousand years ago the Falls were, he infers, at Queenston; and the grounds on which he reasons are exactly those on which one would infer that a laborer who had cut a ditch two hundred yards long at the rate of ten yards per day, and was still at work without pause or intermission, had begun to cut it just twenty days previous. A reverend anti-geologist takes up Sir Charles;[44] and, after denouncing the calculation as "a stab at the Christian religion," seeing it involves the assertion that the "Falls were actually at Queenston four thousand years before the creation of the world according to Moses," he brings certain facts, adduced both by other writers and Sir Charles himself, to bear on the calculation, such as the fact that the deep trench through which the Niagara runs is much narrower in its lower than in its upper reaches, and that the river must have performed its work of excavation, when the breadth was less, at a greatly quicker rate than now. And thus the work of excavating the trench is brought fairly within six thousand years. Nor is the principle of the reasoning bad. In our illustration of the ditch excavated by the laborer we of course take it for granted that it is a ditch of the same depth and breadth throughout, and excavated in the same sort of soil; for if greatly narrower and shallower at one place than at another, or dug in a greatly softer mould, the rate of its excavation at different times might be very different indeed, and the general calculation widely erroneous, if based on the ratio of progress when it went on most slowly, taken as an average ratio for the whole. But the anti-geologist provokes only a smile when, in his triumph, he exultingly exclaims, "It is on grounds such as these that the most learned and voluminous among English geologists disputes the Mosaic history of the Creation and Deluge,--a strong proof that even men of argument on other subjects often reason in the most childish and ridiculous manner, and on grounds totally false, when they undertake to deny the truth of the Holy Scriptures." Now, it must be wholly unnecessary to remark here, that it is surely one thing to "undertake to deny the truth of the Holy Scriptures," and quite another and different thing to hold that the Niagara Falls may have been at Queenston ten thousand years ago; or further, that it seems not in the least wise to stake the truth of Revelation on any such issue. Let me request you, however, to observe, that in one important respect this writer resembles the former one. The former, ignorant of the various phenomena exhibited by the great deposits of Egypt, exhausted all his five thousand six hundred years of available time in accounting for the formation of one of the least of them,--the silt of the Nile; and the latter, though he bids down Sir Charles some four thousand four hundred years or so in the one item of scooping out the bed of the St. Lawrence, at least expends the remainder of the ten thousand,--his five thousand six hundred years,--in that work of excavation alone, and leaves himself no further sums to set off against the various geologic processes that may have preceded it.

In this case, as in the other, let us grant, for the argument's sake, all the facts. Let us admit that the trench through which the St. Lawrence now flows has been cut by the river in somewhat less than six thousand years. But through what, let us ask, has it been cut? There can exist no doubt on the subject: it has been cut through an ancient graveyard of the Upper Silurian system, charged with the peculiar fossils characteristic of what are known as the Clinton and Niagara groups, and common, many of them, to the Upper Silurian of our own country and of the European continent. _Leptaena depressa_ and _Pentamerus oblongus_, two of the most frequent shells of the deposit, occur also in equal abundance in the Dudley and Caradoc formations of England; its prevailing encrinite, _Ichthyocrinus laevis_, is scarce distinguishable from an encrinite which I have often picked up in the quarries of the "Wren's Nest" (_Ichthyocrinus pyriformis_); while its prevailing trilobite, _Phacops limulurus_, seems to be but a transatlantic variety of our well known _Asaphus (Phacops) caudatus_. Further, the sequence of the various formations both above and below the Niagara group, is shown with remarkable distinctness in that part of the world along the shores of the great lakes. They may be traced downward, on the one hand, along the Lower Silurian deposits, to the non-fossiliferous base on which the system rests, and upwards, on the other, through the Old Red Sandstone and the Carboniferous Limestone, to the workable Coal Measures. Both stratigraphically and palaeontologically the place in the scale of the Niagara graveyard can be definitely determined; and a superficial deposit on the heights in its immediate neighborhood shows that the river did not begin its work of excavation among its long extinct shells, trilobites, and corals, until after not only the great Palaeozoic, but also the Secondary and Tertiary divisions had been laid down, and the recent period ushered in. The superficial shells of the adjacent heights belong to the Pleistocene age, and show that in even that comparatively modern time the lower lands of Upper Canada were submerged beneath the level of the ocean, and that a series of deep seas, connected by broad sounds, occupied the place of the great lakes. Not until the last upheaval of the land was the river now known as the St. Lawrence called into existence, to begin its work of excavation; and ere that event took place, fully ten miles of fossiliferous rock had been deposited on the earth's surface, charged with the remains of many succeeding creations. The deposit through which the St. Lawrence is slowly mining its way is older than the river itself by the vast breadth of the four Tertiary periods, by that of all the Secondary ages,--Cretaceous, Oolitic, and Triassic,--by the periods, too, of the Permian system, of the Carboniferous system, of the Old Red system, and of the uppermost beds of the Upper Silurian system. But a simple illustration may better serve to show the true character of the conclusion urged here by the opponent of Sir Charles, than any such line of statement as that which I employ, however clear to the geologist. In the year 1817, Prince's Street, in Edinburgh, was opened up to the Calton Hill, and the Calton burying-ground cut through to the depth of many feet by the roadway. Let us suppose that when the excavation has been carried a hundred yards into the cemetery, a geologist, finding the laborers cutting on the average about a yard per day, simply intimates as his opinion that the laborers have been a hundred days at work. "No," replies a controversialist on the anti-geological side; "for the first fifty yards, so soft was the subsoil, and so shallow the covering of mould, that the laborers must have cut at the rate of two yards a day; it has been merely for the last fifty yards that they have been excavating at the present slow rate: they cannot have been more than seventy-five days at work. I marvel exceedingly at the absurdity of geological reasoners: _palpably the burying-ground of the Calton is only seventy-five days old._" Now, such, in no exaggerated, but, on the contrary, greatly modified form, is the argument that would limit the age of the earth to the period during which the St. Lawrence has been scooping out a channel for itself, from Queenston to Niagara, through an ancient Silurian burying-ground. Both arguments alike confound the age of the ancient burying-grounds with the date of the modern excavations opened up through them; but in order to render the argument of my illustration equally absurd with the other, it would be not only necessary to infer that the Calton cemetery was only seventy-five days old, but also that the rock on which it rested was no older.

But enough of follies such as these! I had marked a good many other passages of similar character in the writings of the recent anti-geologists, and would have little difficulty in filling a volume with such; but it would be a useless, though mayhap curious work, and is much better exhibited by specimen than as a whole. A little folly is amusing, but much of it fatigues. There is a time coming, and now not very distant, when the vagaries of the anti-geologists will be as obsolete as those of the geographers of Salamanca, or as those of the astronomers who upheld the orthodoxy of Ptolemy against Galileo and Newton; and when they will be regarded as a sort of curious fossils, very monstrous and bizarre, and altogether of an extinct type, but which had once not only life, but were formidable. It will then be seen by all what a noble vestibule the old geologic ages form to that human period in which moral responsibility first began upon earth, and a creature destined to immortality anticipated an eternal hereafter. There is always much of the mean and the little in the worlds which man creates for himself, and in the history which he gives them. Of all the abortions of the middle ages which have come down to us, I know not a more miserable one,--at once ludicrous and sad,--than that heavens and earth of Cosmas _Indicopleustes_, the monk, which I illustrated by diagrams in my last lecture (Figs. 114, 115). They are just such heavens and earth as a monk might have made, and made too at a sitting. The heavens, represented as a solid arch raised on tall walls, resemble, as a whole, the arch which figures in the middle of a freemason's apron, or, more homely still, the section of a wine cellar; while the earth lies beneath as a great plain or floor, with a huge hill in the distance, behind which the sun passes when it is night. And yet this scheme gave law to the world for more than six centuries, and lay like a nightmare on physical discovery, astronomic and geographical. The anti-geologists have been less mischievous, for they live in a more enlightened age; and we already see but the straggling remains of the body, and know that the time cannot be far distant when it will be as completely extinct as any of the old faunas. The great globe, ever revolving on itself, and journeying in space round the sun, in obedience to laws which it immortalized a Newton to discover and demonstrate, is an infinitely more sublime and noble object than the earth of Cosmas the monk, with its conical mountain and its crypt-like firmament; nor can I doubt that its history throughout the long geologic ages,--its strange story of successive creations, each placed in advance of that which had gone before, and its succeeding organisms, vegetable and animal, ranged according to their appearance in time, on principles which our profounder students of natural science have but of late determined,--will be found in an equal degree more worthy of its Divine Author than that which would huddle the whole into a few literal days, and convert the incalculably ancient universe which we inhabit into a hastily run-up erection of yesterday.

LECTURE ELEVENTH.

ON THE LESS KNOWN FOSSIL FLORAS OF SCOTLAND.[45]