"assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to man."

There has been war among the intelligences of God's spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts forth less frequently; the dread earthquake shakes more rarely; save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen spirit—profound and active beyond the lot of humanity—would have found ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what these strange things might mean.

With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,—as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,—must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,—scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know! "Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,—how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,—how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,—how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth,—man, the moral agent,—man, the ultimate work and end of creation,—man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened,—how must solicitude have grown,—when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and the proud waves of ocean had been stayed,—when, after species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his experience,—stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God's spiritual universe,—that all animals should die,—that all moral agents should live. How, in this new creature,—this prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before had been united,—the nature of the animals that die with the standing and responsibility of the moral agents that live,—how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute immortality, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with and shade into the mortality which, let us extend the term of previous vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final annihilation and the ceasing to be?

At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God's own finger, and in God's own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made. And yet, left to the freedom of his own will, there is a weakness in the flesh that betrays his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the ground that the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, who, like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and wakes, and can feel thirst and hunger, and the weariness of toil, and the sweets of rest, and who come under the general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated of old to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood of old; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and fell. There awakes a grim hope in the sullen lord of the first revolt. Ages beyond tale or reckoning has this temple of creation been in building. Long have its mute prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in beast, told of coming man, its final object and end. And now there needeth but one blow, and the whole edifice is destroyed, God's purposes marred and frustrated, and this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct races, under the eternal law of death. Armed with the experience in evil of unsummed ages, the Tempter plies his work: nor is it to low or ignoble appetites that he appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for knowledge; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles of the Old Serpent prevail; man falls prostrate before him; creation trembles; and then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo! in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins. Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white tents of the desert; the temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount Zion; prophet after prophet declares his message. At length, in the fulness of time, the Messiah comes; and, in satisfying the law, and in fulfilling all righteousness, and in bringing life and immortality to light, abundantly shows forth that the terminal dynasty of all creation had been of old foreordained, ere the foundations of the world, to possess for its eternal lord and monarch, not primeval man, created in the image of God, but God, made manifest in the flesh, in the form of primeval man. But how breaks on the baffled Tempter the sublime revelation? Wearily did he toil,—darkly did he devise, and take, in his great misery, deep counsel against the Almighty; and yet all the while, while striving and resisting as an enemy, has he been wielded as a tool; when, glaring aloof in his proud rebellion, the grasp of the Omnipotent has been upon him, and the Eternal Purposes have encompassed him, and he has been working out, all unwittingly, the foreordained decree, "For our God maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him, and the remainder thereof doth he restrain."

But enough, for the present, of the poems that might be. Permit me, however, to add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some sort or other,—the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,—with it every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight." Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth had entertained very opposite views,—the poet Coleridge.

It has been said that the inferences of the geologist militate against those of the theologian. Nay, not those of our higher geologists and higher theologians,—not what our Murchisons and Sedgwicks infer in the one field, with what our Chalmerses and Isaac Taylors infer in the other. Between the Word and the Works of God there can be no actual discrepancies; and the seeming ones are discernible only by the men who see worst.

"Mote-like they flicker in unsteady eyes, And weakest his who best descries."

The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the Scriptures could not possibly have been given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science these truths were never yet found, there would be little danger even of difference among them, and none of collision. Nay, there is, I doubt not, a time coming in which the Butlers and Chalmerses of the future will be content to recognize the geologic field as that of their richest and most pregnant analogies. It is with the history of the pre-Adamic ages that geology sets itself to deal; and by carefully conning the ancient characters graven in the rocks, and by deciphering the strange inscriptions which they compose, it greatly extends the record of God's doings upon the earth. And what more natural to expect, or rational to hold, than that the Unchangeable One should have wrought in all time after one general type and pattern, or than that we may seek, in the hope of finding, meet correspondences and striking analogies between his revealed workings during the human period, and his previous workings of old during the geologic periods,—correspondences and analogies suited to establish the identity of the worker, and, of course, from that identity to demonstrate the authenticity of the revelation? Permit me to bring out, in conclusion, what I have often thought on this subject, but have not been able so tersely to express, in a brief quotation from one of the most instructive works of the present age, the "Method of the Divine Government," by the Rev. Dr. M'Cosh:—"Science has a foundation," says this solid thinker and accomplished writer, "and so has religion. Let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of God. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other let those who have faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to God, and the other, the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent in twain, and in which, on a blood-sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God."



LECTURE SEVENTH.

THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.

PART I.

There are events so striking in themselves or from their accompaniments, that they powerfully impress the memories of children but little removed from infancy, and are retained by them in a sort of troubled recollection ever after, however extended their term of life. Samuel Johnson was only two and a half years old when, in accordance with the belief of the time, he was touched by Queen Anne for the "Evil;" but more than seventy years after, he could call up in memory a dream-like recollection of the lady dressed in a black hood, and glittering with diamonds, into whose awful presence he had been ushered on that occasion, and who had done for the cure of his complaint all that legitimate royalty could do. And an ancient lady of the north country, who had been carried, when a child, in her nurse's arms, to witness the last witch execution that took place in Scotland, could distinctly tell, after the lapse of nearly a century, that the fire was surrounded by an awe-struck crowd, and that the smoke of the burning, when blown about her by a cross breeze, had a foul and suffocating odor. In this respect the memory of infant tribes and nations seems to resemble that of individuals. There are characters and events which impress it so strongly, that they seem never to be forgotten, but live as traditions, sometimes mayhap very vague, and much modified by the inventions of an after time, but which, in floating downwards to late ages, always bear about them a certain strong impress of their pristine reality. They are shadows that have become ill defined from the vast distance of the objects that cast them,—like the shadows of great birds flung, in a summer's day, from the blue depths of the sky to the landscape far below,—but whose very presence, however diffused they may have become, testifies to the existence of the remote realities from which they are thrown, and without which they could have had no being at all. The old mythologies are filled with shadowy traditions of this kind,—shadows of the world's "gray fathers,"—which, like those shadows seen reflected on clouds by travellers who ascend lofty mountains, are exaggerated into the most gigantic proportions, and bear radiant glories around their heads.

There is, however, one special tradition which seems to be more deeply impressed and more widely spread than any of the others. The destruction of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world's history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impressed the minds of the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that their remote descendants of the present day have not even yet forgotten it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries, and among the most barbarous tribes. It was the laudable ambition of Humboldt,—first entertained at a very early period of life,—to penetrate into distant regions, unknown to the natives of Europe at the time, that he might acquaint himself, in fields of research altogether fresh and new, with men and with nature in their most primitive conditions. In carrying out his design, he journeyed far into the woody wilderness that surrounds the Orinoco, and found himself among tribes of wild Indians whose very names were unknown to the civilized world. And yet among even these forgotten races of the human family he found the tradition of the deluge still fresh and distinct; not confined to single tribes, but general among the scattered nations of that great region, and intertwined with curious additions, suggestive of the inventions of classic mythology in the Old World. "The belief in a great deluge," we find him saying, "is not confined to one nation singly,—the Tamanacs: it makes part of a system of historical tradition, of which we find scattered notions among the Maypures of the great cataracts; among the Indians of the Rio Erevato, which runs into the Caura; and among almost all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco. When the Tamanacs are asked how the human race survived this great deluge,—'the age of water' of the Mexicans,—they say, a man and woman saved themselves on a high mountain called Tamanacu, situated on the banks of the Asiveru, and, casting behind them over their heads the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in these fruits produce men and women, who re-peopled the earth. Thus," adds the philosophic traveller, "we find in all simplicity, among nations now in a savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished with all the charms of imagination." The resemblance is certainly very striking. "Quit the temple," said the Oracle to Deucalion and Pyrrha, when they had consulted it, after the great deluge, regarding the mode in which the earth was to be re-peopled,—"vail your heads, unloose your girdles, and throw behind your backs the bones of your grandmother." Rightly interpreting what seemed darkest and most obscure in the reply, they took "stones of the earth," and, casting them behind them, the stones flung by Deucalion became men, and those by Pyrrha became women, and thus the disfurnished world was peopled anew. The navigator always regards himself as sure of his position when he has two landmarks to determine it by, or when in the open ocean he can ascertain, not only his latitude, but his longitude also. And this curious American tradition seems to have its two such marks,—its two bisecting lines of determination,—to identify it with the classic tradition of the Old World that refers evidently to the same great event.

There are other portions of America in which the tradition of the Flood is still more distinct than among the forests of the Orinoco. It is related by Herrera, one of the Spanish historians of America, that even the most barbarous of the Brazilians had some knowledge of a general deluge; that in Peru the ancient Indians reported, that many years before there were any Incas, all the people were drowned by a great flood, save six persons, the progenitors of the existing races, who were saved on a float; that among the Mechoachans it was believed that a single family was preserved, during the outburst of the waters, in an ark, with a sufficient number of animals to replenish the new world; and, more curious still, that it used to be told by the original inhabitants of Cuba, that "an old man, knowing the deluge was to come, built a great ship, and went into it with his family and abundance of animals; and that, wearying during the continuance of the flood, he sent out a crow, which at first did not return, staying to feed on the dead bodies, but afterwards returned bearing with it a green branch." The resemblance borne by this last tradition to the Mosaic narrative is so close as to awaken a doubt whether it may not have been but a mere recollection of the teaching of some early missionary. Nor can its genuineness now be tested, seeing that the race which cherished it has been long since extinct. It may be stated, however, that a similar suspicion crossed the mind of Humboldt when he was engaged in collecting the traditions of the Indians of the Orinoco; but that on further reflection and inquiry he dismissed the doubt as groundless. He even set himself to examine whether the district was not a fossiliferous one, and whether beds of sea shells, or deposits charged with the petrified remains of corals or of fishes, might not have originated among the aborigines some mere myth of a great inundation sufficient to account for the appearances in the rocks. But he found that the region was mainly a primary one, in which he could detect only a single patch of sedimentary rock, existing as an unfossiliferous sandstone. And so, though little prejudiced in favor of the Mosaic record, he could not avoid arriving at the conclusion, simply in his character as a philosophic inquirer, who had no other object than to attain to the real and the true, that the legend of the wild Maypures and Tamanacs regarding a great destructive deluge was simply one of the many forms of that oldest of traditions which appears to be well nigh coextensive with the human family, and which, in all its varied editions, seems to point at one and the same signal event. Very varied some of these editions are. The inhabitants of Tahiti tell, for instance, that the Supreme God, a long time ago, being angry, dragged the earth through the sea, but that by a happy accident their island broke off and was preserved; the Indians of Terra Firma believe, that when the great deluge took place, one man, with his wife and children, escaped in a canoe; and the Indians of the North American lakes hold, that the father of all their tribes being warned in a dream that a flood was coming, built a raft, on which he preserved his family, and pairs of all the animals, and which drifted about for many months, until at length a new earth was made for their reception by the "Mighty Man above."

In that widely extended portion of the Old World over which Christianity has spread in its three great types,—Greek, Romish, and Protestant,—and in the scarce less extended portion occupied by the followers of Mohammed, the Scriptural account of the deluge, or the imperfect reflection of it borrowed by the Koran, has, of course, supplanted the old traditions. But outside these regions we find the traditions existing still. One of the sacred books of the Parsees (representatives of the ancient Persians) records, that "the world having been corrupted by Ahriman the Evil One, it was thought necessary to bring over it a universal flood of waters, that all impurity might be washed away. Accordingly the rain came down in drops as large as the head of a bull, until the earth was wholly covered with water, and all the creatures of the Evil One perished. And then the flood gradually subsided, and first the mountains, and next the plains, appeared once more." In the Scandinavian Edda, between whose wild fables and those of the sacred books of the Parsees there has been a resemblance traced by accomplished antiquaries such as Mallet, the tradition of the deluge takes a singularly monstrous form. On the death of the great giant Ymir, whose flesh and bones form the rocks and soils of the earth, and who was slain by the early gods, his blood, which now constitutes the ocean, rushed so copiously out of his wounds, that all the old race of the lesser giants, his offspring, were drowned in the flood which it occasioned, save one; and he, by escaping on board his bark with his wife, outlived the deluge. The tradition here is evidently allegorized, but it is by no means lost in the allegory.

Sir William Jones, perhaps the most learned and accomplished man of his age (such at least was the estimate of Johnson), and the first who fairly opened up the great storehouse of eastern antiquities, describes the tradition of the deluge as prevalent also in the vast Chinese empire, with its three hundred millions of people. He states that it was there believed that, just ere the appearance of Fohi in the mountains, a mighty flood, which first "flowed abundantly, and then subsided, covered for a time the whole earth, and separated the higher from the lower age of mankind." The Hindu tradition, as related by Sir William, though disfigured by strange additions, is still more explicit. An evil demon having purloined the sacred books from Brahma, the whole race of men became corrupt except the seven Nishis, and in especial the holy Satyavrata, the prince of a maritime region, who, when one day bathing in a river, was visited by the god Vishnu in the shape of a fish, and thus addressed by him:—"In seven days all creatures who have offended me shall be destroyed by a deluge; but thou shalt be secured in a capacious vessel, miraculously formed. Take, therefore, all kinds of medicinal herbs, and esculent grain for food, and, together with the seven holy men, your respective wives, and pairs of all animals, enter the ark without fear: then shalt thou know God face to face, and all thy questions shall be answered." The god then disappeared; and after seven days, during which Satyavrata had conformed in all respects to the instructions given him, the ocean began to overflow the coasts, and the earth to be flooded by constant rains, when a large vessel was seen coming floating shore-wards on the rising waters; into which the Prince and the seven virtuous Nishis entered, with their wives, all laden with plants and grain, and accompanied by the animals. During the deluge Vishnu preserved the ark by again taking the form of a fish, and tying it fast to himself; and when the waters had subsided, he communicated the contents of the sacred books to the holy Satyavrata, after first slaying the demon who had stolen them. It is added, however, that the good man having, on one occasion long after, by "the act of destiny," drunk mead, he became senseless, and lay asleep naked, and that Charma, one of three sons who had been born to him, finding him in that sad state, called on his two brothers to witness the shame of their father, and said to them, What has now befallen? In what state is this our sire? But by the two brothers,—more dutiful than Charma,—he was hidden with clothes, and recalled to his senses; and, having recovered his intellect, and perfectly knowing what had passed, he cursed Charma, saying, "Thou shalt be a servant of servants." It would be difficult certainly to produce a more curious legend, or one more strikingly illustrative of the mixture of truth and fable which must ever be looked for in that tradition which some are content to accept even in religion as a trustworthy guide. In ever varying tradition, as in those difficult problems in physical science which have to be wrought out from a multitude of differing observations, it is, if I may so express myself, the mean result of the whole that must be accepted as approximately the true one. And the mean result of those dim and distorted recollections of the various tribes of men which refer to the Flood is a result which bears simply to this effect,—that in some early age of the world a great deluge took place, in which well nigh the whole human family was destroyed.

The ancient traditions which have come down to us embalmed in classic literature form but a small portion of what seems once to have existed in the wide region now overspread by Christianity and Mohammedanism. A second deluge, more fatal to at least the productions of the human mind than the first had been, overspread the earth during what are known as the Middle Ages; and so signal was the wreck which it occasioned, that of seven heathen writers[24] whose testimony regarding the Flood Josephus cites as corroborative of his own, not one has descended in his writings to these later times. We learn, however, from the Jewish historian, that one of their number, Berosus, was a Chaldean; that two of the others, Hieronymus and Manetho, were Egyptians; and that a third, Nicolaus, whose history he quotes, was a citizen of Damascus. "There is," said this latter writer, in his perished history, "a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark came on shore on the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man," added this forgotten writer, "about whom Moses, the legislator of the Jews, wrote." The works of the Chaldean, Berosus, have long since been lost, all save a few extracts preserved by the Patristic writers. One of these, however, which embodies the Chaldean tradition of the Flood, is very remarkable. Like the Scandinavian legend, it represents the antediluvians as giants, all of whom, save one, became exceedingly impious and depraved. "But there was one among the giants," says Berosus, "that reverenced the gods, and was more wise and prudent than all the rest. His name was Noa; he dwelt in Syria, with his three sons, Sem, Japet, Chem, and their wives, the great Tidea, Pandora, Noela, and Noegla. This man, fearing the destruction which, he foresaw from the stars, would come to pass, began, in the seventy-eighth year before the inundation, to build a ship covered like an ark. Seventy-eight years from the time he began to build this ship, the ocean of a sudden broke out, and all the inland seas and the rivers and fountains bursting from beneath (attended by the most violent rains from heaven for many days), overflowed all the mountains; so that the whole human race was buried in the waters, except Noa and his family, who were saved by means of the ship, which, being lifted up by the waters, rested at last upon the top of the Gendyae or Mountain, on which, it is reported, there now remaineth some part, and that men take away the bitumen from it, and make use of it by way of charm or expiation, to avoid evil." A more general Assyrian tradition, somewhat different in its details, also survives.[25] The god Chronus, it was said, appeared in a vision to Xisuthrus, the tenth king of Babylon; and, warning him that on a certain day there would be a great flood upon the earth, by which mankind would be destroyed, he enjoined him to build a vessel, and to bring into it his friends and relatives, with everything necessary to sustain life, and all the various animals, birds, and quadrupeds. In obedience to the command, the king built a vessel about three quarters of a mile in length and half a mile in breadth, which he loaded with stores and the different kinds of animals; and into which, on the day of the flood, he himself entered, accompanied by his wife and children, and all his friends. The flood broke out. After, however, accomplishing its work of destruction, it abated; and the king sent out birds from the vessel, which, at first finding no food or place of rest, returned to him; but which, when, after the lapse of some days, he sent them forth again, came back to him with their feet tinged with mud. On a third trial they returned no more; upon which, judging that the surface of the earth was laid dry, he made an opening in the vessel, and, looking forth, found it stranded on a mountain of the land of Armenia.

There seems to exist no such definite outline of the Egyptian tradition referred to by Josephus as that preserved of the Chaldean one. Plato, In his "Timaeus," makes the Egyptian priest whom he introduces as discoursing with Solon, to attribute that clear recollection of a remote antiquity which survived in Egypt, to its comparative freedom from those great floods which had at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed the memory of remote events by the destruction of the people and their records; and Bacon had evidently this passage in view when he poetically remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that "the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are two,—deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account of the time past." Even in Egypt, however, the recollection of the deluge seems to have survived, though it lay entangled amid what seem to be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah of Egypt," says Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay (Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark, which, being closed, he was forced to sea; and it was a curious fact, that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,—the very day, most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The classical tradition of Greece, as if the events whence it took its rise had been viewed through a multiplying glass, appears to have been increased from one to many. Plutarch enumerates no fewer than five great floods; and Plato makes his Egyptian priest describe the Greek deluges as oft repeated and numerous. There was the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Ogyges, and several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the mythologic ages,—the last of them to which any determining circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,—it appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than that many wide-spread and destructive floods should have taken place in the obscure, fabulous ages of Grecian story, while not one such flood has happened during its two thousand five hundred years of authentic history. Nor is it difficult to conceive how such repetitions of the original tradition should have taken place. The traditions of the same event preserved by tribes living in even the same tract of country come in course of time considerably to differ from each other in their adjuncts and circumstances; those, for instance, of the various tribes of the Orinoco do so; and should these tribes come to be fused ultimately into one nation, nothing seems more probable than that their varying editions, instead of being also fused together, should remain distinct, as the recollections of separate and independent catastrophes. And thus the several deluges of Grecian mythology may in reality testify, not to the occurrence of several floods, but to the existence merely of several independent tribes, among whom the one great tradition has been so altered and modified ere they came to possess a common literature, that when at length they became skilful enough to place it on record, it appeared to them not as one, but as many. The admirable reflection of Humboldt suggested by the South American traditions seems, incidentally at least, to bear out this view. "Those ancient traditions of the human race," he says, "which we find dispersed over the whole surface of the globe, like the relics of a vast shipwreck, are highly interesting in the philosophical study of our own species. How many different tongues belonging to branches that appear totally distinct transmit to us the same facts! The traditions concerning races that have been destroyed, and the renewal of nature, scarcely vary in reality, though every nation gives them a local coloring. In the great continents, as in the smallest islands of the Pacific Ocean, it is always on the loftiest and nearest mountain that the remains of the human race have been saved; and this event appears the more recent in proportion as the nations are uncultivated, and as the knowledge they have of their own existence has no very remote date." And it seems at least not improbable, that the several traditions of apparently special deluges,—deluges each with its own set of circumstances, and from which the progenitors of one nation were saved on a hill-top, those of another on a raft, and those of yet another in an ark or canoe, and which in one instance destroyed only giants, and had in another the loss which they occasioned repaired by date-stones, and in yet another by stones of the earth,—should come to be regarded among a people composed of various tribes, and but little accustomed to sift the evidence on which they founded, rather as all diverse narratives of diverse events, than as in reality but varied accounts of one and the same tremendous catastrophe.

Taking it for granted, then, that the several Greek traditions refer to but one great event, let us accept that which records what is known as the flood of Deucalion, as more adequately representative of the general type of its class, especially in the edition given by Lucian (in his work "De Dea Syria"), than any of the others. "The present world," says this writer, "is peopled from the sons of Deucalion. In respect to the former brood, they were men of violence, and lawless in their dealings; they regarded not oaths, nor observed the rites of hospitality, nor showed mercy to those who sued for it. On this account they were doomed to destruction; and for this purpose there was a mighty eruption of water from the earth, attended with heavy showers from above, so that the rivers swelled and the sea overflowed, till the whole earth was covered with a flood, and all flesh drowned. Deucalion alone was preserved, to people the world. This mercy was shown him on account of his justice and piety. His preservation was effected in this manner:—He put all his family, both his sons and their wives, into a vast ark which he had provided, and he then went into it himself. At the same time, animals of every species,—boars, horses, lions, serpents,—whatever lived upon the face of the earth,—followed him by pairs; all which he received into the ark, and experienced no evil from them." Such is the tradition of Deucalion, as preserved by Lucian. It is added by his contemporary Plutarch, that "Deucalion, as his voyage was drawing to a close, sent out a dove, which coming in a short time back to him, indicated that the waters still covered the earth; but which on a second occasion failed to return; or, as some say, returned to him with mud-stained feet, and thus intimated the abatement of the flood." It cannot, I think, be rationally doubted that we have in this ancient legend one other tradition of the Noachian Deluge. Even as related by Ovid, with all the license of the poet, we find in it the great leading traits that indicate its parentage. I quote from the vigorous translation of Dryden.

"Impetuous rain descends; Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down; But from his brother of the seas he craves To help him with auxiliary waves. Then with his mace the monarch struck the ground; With inward trembling earth received the wound, And rising streams a ready passage found. Now seas and earth were in confusion lost,— A world of waters, and without a coast. A mountain of tremendous height there stands Betwixt the Athenian and Boeotian lands: Parnassus is its name, whose forky rise Mounts through the clouds, and mates the lofty skies. High on the summit of this dubious cliff, Deucalion, wafting, moored his little skiff: He, with his wife, were only left behind Of perished man; they two were human kind: The most upright of mortal men was he,— The most serene and holy woman she."



Such are some of the traditions of that great catastrophe which overtook the human family in its infancy, and made so deep an impression on the memories of the few awe-struck survivors, that the race never forgot it. Ere the dispersal of the family it would have of course existed as but one unique recollection,—a single reflection on the face of an unbroken mirror. But the mirror has since been shattered into a thousand pieces; and we now find the object, originally but one, pictured in each broken fragment, with various degrees of distinctness, according to the various degrees of injury received by the reflecting medium. Picture, too, scarce less certainly than language spoken and written, testifies to the wide extent of the tradition. Its symbols are found stamped on coins of old classical Greece; they have been traced amid the ancient hieroglyphics of Egypt, recognized in the sculptured caves of Hindustan, and detected even in the far west, among the picture writings of Mexico. The several glyphic representatives of the tradition bear, like its various written or oral editions, a considerable resemblance to each other. Even in the rude paintings of the old Mexican, the same leading idea may be traced as in the classic sculpture of the Greek. On what is known to antiquaries as the Apamaean medal, struck during the reign of Philip the elder, we find the familiar name of Noe inscribed on a floating chest or ark, within which a man and woman are seen seated, and to which a bird on the wing is represented as bearing a branch.[26] And in an ancient Mexican painting, figured by Humboldt, "the man and woman who survived the age of water" are shown similarly inclosed in a leaf-tufted box, or hollow trunk of a tree; while a gigantic female,—Matalcueje, the goddess of water,—is seen pouring down her floods around them, and upon an overwhelmed human figure, representative apparently of the victims of the catastrophe. All is classical in the forms of the one representation, and uncouth in those of the other. They bear the same sort of artistic relation to each other that the rude Tamanac tradition bears, in a literary point of view, to the well constructed story and elegant verse of Ovid; but they are charged apparently with the same meaning, and shadow forth the same event.



The tradition of the Flood may, I repeat, be properly regarded as universal; seeing there is scarce any considerable race of man among which, in some of its many forms, it is not to be found. Now, it has been argued by some of the older theologians, with a not very cogent logic, that the universality of the tradition establishes the universality of the Flood,—that where the tradition is to be found, the Flood must have been;—an argument which would have force if it could also be shown that each tribe had had its own Noah, saved by ark, raft, or canoe, or on some tall mountain summit, in the region in which his descendants continued to reside; but of no force whatever if the Noah of the race was but one, and if the scene of his danger and deliverance was restricted, as of necessity it must have been in that case, to a single locality. Further, if, as we believe, there was but one Noah,—if, according to the Scriptural account, condensed into a single sentence by the Apostle, only "eight souls" were saved in the great catastrophe of the race,—there could have existed no human testimony to determine whether the exterminating deluge that occasioned their destruction was a universal deluge, or merely a partial one. It could not be known by men shut up in an ark, nor even though from a mast top they could have swept the horizon with a telescope, whether the waters that spread out on every side of them, covering the old familiar mountains, and occupying the entire range of their vision, extended all around the globe, or found their limits some eight or ten hundred miles away. The point is one respecting which, as certainly as respecting the creation of the world itself, or of the world's inhabitants, there could have existed no human witness-bearing: contemporary man, left to the unassisted evidence of his senses, must of necessity have been ignorant of the extent of the deluge. True, what man could never have known of himself, God could have told him, and in many cases has told him; but then, God's revelations have in most instances been made to effect exclusively moral purposes; and we know that those who have perilously held that, along with the moral facts, definite physical facts, geographic, geologic, or astronomical, had also been imparted, have almost invariably found themselves involved in monstrous error. And in this matter of the Flood, though it be a fact of great moral significancy that God in an early period of the human history destroyed the whole race for their wickedness,—all save one just man and his family,—it is not in the least a matter of moral significancy whether or no the deluge by which the judgment was effected covered not only the parts of the earth occupied by man at the time, but extended also to Terra del Fuego, Tahiti, and the Falkland Islands. In fine, though the question whether the Noachian deluge was universal, or merely partial, is an interesting question in physics, it is in no higher degree a moral one than those questions which relate to the right figure or age of the earth, or to the true motions of the heavenly bodies. And it will be found that the only passages in Scripture which refer to this strictly physical subject, instead of determining the geographic extent of the Flood, serve only to raise a question regarding their own extent of meaning.

It is known to all students of the sacred writings, that there is a numerous class of passages in both the Old and New Testaments in which, by a sort of metonymy common in the East, a considerable part is spoken of as the whole, though in reality often greatly less than a moiety of the whole. Of this class are the passages in which it is said, that on the day of Pentecost there were Jews assembled at Jerusalem "out of every nation under heaven;" "that the gospel was preached to every creature under heaven;" that the Queen of Sheba came to hear the wisdom of Solomon from the "uttermost parts of the earth;" that God put the dread and fear of the children of Israel upon the nations that were "under the whole heaven;" and that "all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn." And of course the universally admitted existence of such a class of passages, in which words are not to be accepted in their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain great modifications, renders the task of determining and distinguishing such passages from others in which the meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate, but also laudable; and justifies us in inquiring whether those passages descriptive of the Flood or its effects, in which it is said that the "waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth," so that "all the high hills that were under the whole heavens were covered," or that "all flesh died that moved upon the earth," belong to their number or no. There are some instances in which the Scriptures themselves reveal the character and limit the meaning of the metonymic passages. They do so with respect to the passage already quoted regarding the stranger Jews assembled in Jerusalem at the Pentecostal feast,—"out of every nation under heaven." For further on we read that these Jews had come from but the various countries extending around Judea, as far as Italy on the one hand, and the Persian Gulf on the other;—an area large, indeed, but scarce equal to a one fiftieth part of the earth's surface. But there is no such explanation given to limit or restrict most of the other passages; the modifying element must be sought for outside the sacred volume,—in ancient history or ancient geography. The reader must, for instance, acquaint himself with the progress of discovery in early ages, or the boundaries of the Roman Empire under the first Caesars, ere he can form a probable conjecture regarding the extent of that "all the earth" which sought the presence of Solomon, or a correct estimate respecting the limits of that "all the world" which Caesar Augustus could have taxed. And to this last class, which fail to explain themselves, the passages respecting the Flood evidently belong. Like the passages cited, and, with these, almost all the texts of Scripture in which questions of physical science are involved, the limiting, modifying, explaining facts and circumstances must be sought for in that outside region of secular research, historic and scientific, from which of late years so much valuable biblical illustration has been derived, and with which it is so imperatively the duty of the Church to keep up an acquaintance at least as close and intimate as that maintained with it by her gainsayers and assailants.

That the Noachian deluge might have been but partial, not universal, was held, let me here remark, by distinguished theologians in our own country, at least as early as the seventeenth century. It was held, for instance, by the learned biblical commentator, old Matthew Poole, whom we find saying, in his Synopsis on Genesis, that "it is not to be supposed that the entire globe of the earth was covered with water;" for "where," he adds, "was the need of overwhelming those regions in which there were no human beings?" It was held also by that distinguished Protestant churchman of the reign of Charles II., Bishop Stillingfleet, whom Principal Cunningham of Edinburgh well describes, in his elaborate edition of the Bishop's work, "The Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome," as a divine of "great talents and prodigious learning." "I cannot see," says the Bishop, in his "Origines Sacra," "any urgent necessity from the Scriptures to assert that the Flood did spread over all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the Scriptures. The Flood was universal as to mankind; but from thence follows no necessity at all of asserting the universality of it as to the globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole earth was peopled before the Flood, which I despair of ever seeing proved." It was not, however, until the comparatively recent times in which the belief entertained by Poole and Stillingfleet was adopted and enforced by writers such as Dr. Pye Smith, and Professor Hitchcock of the United States, that there was any show of argument displayed against the theory of a partial deluge which would now be deemed worthy of consideration. And these modern objections may be found ingeniously arrayed by the late Dr. John Kitto, in his "Daily Bible Illustrations," published only six years ago (in 1850), and by the learned Dr. William Hamilton of Mobile, in his "Friend of Moses," published in 1852. Both these writers, however, virtually agree with their opponents in holding that the strict meaning of the terms employed by Moses in describing the deluge is to be determined on considerations apart from the mere philological ones. After marshalling his objections to the theory of a local flood, Dr. Kitto goes on to say, "We yield our judgment to what appears to us the force of these arguments as to the meaning of Scripture;" and we find Dr. Hamilton prefacing his objections as follows:—"Were the mere universality of some of the terms employed in the Mosaic narrative the sole ground of objection to the hypothesis of a local inundation only in the days of Noah, that hypothesis might perhaps be deemed admissible. But there are," he adds, "other and more serious difficulties attending it." Let us, then, briefly examine these supposed difficulties and objections; and as they have been better and more amply stated by Dr. Kitto than by any other writer with whom I am acquainted,—for Dr. Hamilton takes up rather the arguments in favor of a universal, than the objections against a merely partial flood,—let us take them as they occur in his writings, especially in the excellent work now before me,—his "Daily Bible Illustrations." It will scarce be suspected that such an accomplished writer, who did so much for Biblical Illustration, and whose admirable Pictorial Bible formed, with but four works more, what Chalmers used to term with peculiar emphasis his "Biblical Library,"[27] would do injustice to any cause, or any line of argument which he adopted, if it was in reality a good and sound one.

It may be well, however, not to test too rigidly the value of the remark,—meant to be at least of the nature of argument,—when we find him saying that "a plain man sitting down to read the Scripture account of the deluge would have no doubt of its universality." Perhaps not. But it is at least equally certain, that plain men who set themselves to deduce from Scripture the figure of the planet we inhabit had as little doubt, until corrected by the geographer, that the earth was a great plane,—not a sphere; that plain men who set themselves to acquire from Scripture some notion of the planetary motions had no doubt, in the same way, until corrected by the astronomer, that it was the earth that rested, and the sun that moved round it; and that plain men who have sought to determine from Scripture the age of the earth have had no doubt, until corrected by the geologist, that it was at most not much more than six thousand years old. In fine, when plain men, who, according to Cowper, "know, and know no more, their Bible true," have in perhaps every instance learned from it what it was in reality intended to teach,—the way of salvation,—it seems scarce less certain, that in every instance in which they have sought to deduce from it what it was not intended to teach,—the truths of physical science,—they have fallen into extravagant error. And as any question which, bearing, not on the punitory extent and ethical consequences of the Flood, but merely on its geographic limits and natural effects, is not a moral, but a purely physical question, it would be but a fair presumption, founded on the almost invariable experience of ages, that the deductions from Scripture of the "plain men" regarding it would be, not true, but false deductions. Of apparently not more real weight and importance is the doctor's further remark, that there seems, after all, to be a marked difference between the terms in which the universality of the deluge is spoken of, and the terms employed in those admittedly metonymic passages in which the whole is substituted for a part. "What limitation," he asks, "can we assign to such a phrase as this:—'all the high hills that were UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVENS were covered?' If here the phrase had been, 'upon the face of the whole earth,' we should have been told that 'the whole earth' had sometimes the meaning of 'the whole land;' but, as if designedly to obviate such a limitation of meaning, we have here the largest phrase of universality which the language of man affords,—'under the whole heavens!'" So far Dr. Kitto. But his argument seems to be not more valuable in this case than in the other. It was upon the nations that were "UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVENS" that Deity represented himself as putting the fear and dread of the children of Israel; but he would be certainly a very "plain man" who would infer from the universality of a passage so evidently metonymic, that that fear extended to the people of Japan on the one hand, or to the Red Indians of the Rocky Mountains on the other. The phrase "under the whole heavens" seems to be but coextensive in meaning with the phrase "upon the face of the whole earth." The "whole earth" is evidently tantamount to the whole terrestrial floor,—the "whole heavens," to the whole celestial roof that arches over it; and on what principle the whole terrestrial floor is to be deemed less extensive than the floor under the whole celestial roof, really does not appear. Further, nothing can be more certain than that both the phrases contrasted by Dr. Kitto are equally employed in the metonymic form.

When, however, the doctor passes to argument based upon natural science, we find what he adduces worthy of our attention, were it but for the inquiries which it suggests. "If the deluge were but local," we find him saying, "what was the need of taking birds into the ark; and among them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove? A deluge which could overspread the region which these birds inhabit could hardly have been less than universal. If the deluge were local, and all the birds of these kinds in that district perished,—though we should think they might have fled to the uninundated regions,—it would have been useless to encumber the ark with them, seeing that the birds of the same species which survived in the lands not overflowed would speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters subsided." It will be found that the reasoning here is mainly based upon an error in natural science, into which even naturalists of the last century, such as Buffon, not unfrequently fell, and which was almost universal among the earlier voyagers and travellers,—the error of confounding as identical the merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of thus assigning to species wide areas in creation which in reality they do not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or rather family; for it consists of more genera than one. It is so extensively present over the northern hemisphere, that Siberia, Norway, Iceland, and North America, have all their grouse,—the latter continent, indeed, from five to eight different kinds; and yet so restricted are some of the species of which they consist, that, were the British islands to be submerged, one of the best known of the family,—the red grouse, or moor-fowl (Lagopus Scoticus),—would disappear from creation. This bird, which, rated at its money value, is one of the most important in Europe,—for the barren moors which it frequents in the Highlands of Scotland alone are let every season almost entirely for its sake for hundreds of thousands of pounds,—is exclusively a British bird; and, unless by miracle a new migratory instinct were given to it, a complete submersion of the British islands would secure its destruction. If the submergence amounted to but a few hundred miles in lateral extent, the moor-fowl would to a certainty not seek the distant uninundated land. Nor is it at all to be inferred, that in a merely local but wide spread deluge, birds occupying a more extensive area than that overspread by the Flood would, according to Dr. Kitto, "speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters had subsided." The statement must have been hazarded in ignorance of the peculiar habits of many of the non-migratory birds. Up till about the middle of the last century, the capercailzie, or great cock of the woods, was a native of Scotland. It was exterminated, however, about the time of the last Rebellion, or not long after: the last specimen seen among the pine forests of Strathspey was killed, it is said, in the year 1745: the last specimen seen among the woods of Strathglass survived till the year 1760. Pennant relates that he saw in 1769 a specimen, probably a stuffed one, that had been killed shortly before in the neighborhood of Inverness. But from at least that time the species disappeared from the British islands; and, though it continued to exist in Norway, did not "replenish the tracts from which it had been extirpated." The late Marquis of Breadalbane was at no small cost and trouble in re-introducing the species, and to some extent he succeeded; but the capercailzie is, I understand, still restricted to the Breadalbane woods. I have seen the golden eagle annihilated as a species in move than one district of the north of Scotland; nor, though it still exists in other parts of the kingdom, and is comparatively common among the mountains of Norway, have I known it in any instance to spread anew over the tracts from which it had been extirpated. So much for the general reasonings of Dr. Kitto. Further, we find him stating, that a deluge which could overspread the region inhabited by birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove, could hardly have been less than universal. The doctor, however, ought to have known that the dove is a family, not a species. All the American species of doves, for example, differ from the six European species, three of which are to be found in Scotland. Of even the American passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratoria), which occur in such numbers in their native country as actually to eclipse, during their migratory flights, the light of day, only a single straggler,—the one whose chance visit has been recorded by Dr. Fleming,—seems to have been ever seen in Britain. And the East has also its own peculiar species, unknown to Europe. The golden-green pigeons and the great crowned pigeons of the Indian isles are never seen in northern and western latitudes, save in stuffed specimens in a museum. The Vinago pigeons, with their vividly bright plumes, though they exist in several species, are all restricted to the woods of the torrid zone. Even the collared dove of Africa and the Levant rarely visits, and then only as a straggler, the western and northern parts of Europe. The blue-capped turteline pigeon is restricted, as a species, to the island of Celebes; the blue and green turteline pigeon is a native of New Guinea; the Cape turtle occurs in but the southern parts of Africa; the Nicobar ground pigeon in but the Indian Archipelago; the magnificent fruit pigeon in the eastern parts of Australia; and the crowned goura pigeon, the giant of its family, in the Molucca Islands. No single species of dove seems to be so widely spread but that it might be exterminated in a merely partial deluge; and of course conjecture may in vain weary itself in striving to determine what that particular species was which Noah sent forth as a messenger from the ark, or in inquiring what was the extent of the area which it occupied? The common raven is more widely spread than any single species of pigeon. Even the raven, however, seems restricted to the northern hemisphere. India and Southern Africa have both their ravens; but the species differ from each other, and from the widely spread northern one. It is a question whether even the pied raven of the Faroe Isles be not a distinct bird from the black raven of our own country: if not an independent species, it is at least a very remarkable variety. Further, when extirpated in a district, it is found that, as in the case of the capercailzie and the golden eagle, the neighboring regions in which the raven continues to exist fail for ages to furnish a fresh supply. There are counties in England in which the raven is now never seen; and I am acquainted with a district in the north of Scotland from which, when a pair that were known to breed for more than a century in a tall cliff were destroyed by the fowler, the species disappeared.[28] Such, when examined, are the arguments drawn by Dr. Kitto from natural science; nor is he in any degree happier when he resorts to arguments more restrictedly physical. "If," we find him saying, "the waters of the Deluge rose fifteen cubits above all the mountains of the countries which the raven and the dove inhabit, the level must have been high enough to give universality to the Deluge." The only point here not already dealt with,—for I have just shown that certain species of the dove and the raven might have of necessity been inmates of the ark, though the Flood had been only a partial one,—is that which refers to the submergence of the hills over at least an extensive tract, and to the inference, evident in the passage, that if lofty mountains were covered in one portion of the globe, mountains of similar altitude must have been equally covered in every other portion of it.

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

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

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



LECTURE EIGHTH.

THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.

PART II.

A century has not yet gone by since all the organic remains on which the science of Palaeontology is now founded were regarded as the wrecks of a universal deluge, and held good in evidence that the waters had prevailed in every known country, and risen over the highest hills. Intelligent observers were not wanting at even an earlier time who maintained that a temporary flood could not have occasioned phenomena so extraordinary. Such was the view taken by several Italian naturalists of the seventeenth century, and in Britain by the distinguished mathematician Hooke, the contemporary, and in some matters rival, of Newton. But the conclusions of these observers, now so generally adopted, were regarded both in Popish and Protestant countries as but little friendly to Revelation; and so strong was the opposite opinion, and so generally were petrifactions regarded as so many proofs of a universal deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, first in his Dissertation drawn up for the Academy at Bologna, and next in his article on 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.