That this extinct group of animals inhabited for ages the countries in which their remains are now embedded, is rendered evident by their great numbers in some localities, and from their occurrence in various states of preservation, and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteen years by the oyster dredgers of the Norfolk coast from a tract of submerged drift, could not all have been contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have represented several generations. And of course the two thousand grinders brought up from the exposed surface of the drift must have borne but a small proportion to the thousands still dispersed throughout the entire depth of the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on the mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, and which evaded the important question of species, might be eluded, however unfairly, by the assertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times accumulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why might not a universal flood have accumulated on this special tract of drift, the carcasses of many elephants? But it will be found greatly more difficult to elude the ingenious argument on the general question of Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, one of the most numerous animals of this ancient group was the great Irish elk, Megaceros Hibernicus, a creature that, measured to the top of its enormous antlers, stood ten feet four inches in height, and exceeded in bulk and size the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns; "and a male deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, "to have left about eight pairs of antlers, besides its bones, to testify its former existence upon the earth. But as the female has usually no antlers, our expectations might be limited to the discovery of four times as many pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the countries in which such deer have lived and died. The actual proportion of the fossil antlers of the great extinct species of British Pliocene deer (which antlers are proved by the form of their base to have been shed by the living animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, it may be contended that the swollen carcass of a drowned exotic deer might be borne along a diluvial wave to a considerable distance, and its bones ultimately deposited far from its native soil, it is not credible that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried by the same cause to the same distance; or that any of them could be rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the fractured specimens are generally found in caves, and show marks of the teeth of the ossivorous hyaenas by which they had been gnawed; thus at the same time revealing the mode in which they were introduced into those caves, and proving the contemporaneous existence in this island of both kinds of mammalia."



But the contents of the bone caves, consisting in large part of the extinct mammals, ought of themselves to be decisive in this question. As the opening of the Kirkdale cavern is only about four feet each way, a diluvial wave, charged with the wreck of the lower latitudes, could scarce have washed into such an orifice any considerable number of the intertropical animals. And yet there has been found in this cave,—with the teeth of a very young mammoth, of a very great tiger, of a tiger-like animal whose genus is extinct, of a rhinoceros, and of a hippopotamus,—the fragmentary remains of from two to three hundred hyaenas. Further, even supposing, what is impossible, that a diluvial wave had swept them all from the tropics into the four-feet hole, on what principle is it to be explained that the bones thus washed into the cave should be all gnawed bones, even those of the hyaenas themselves, whereas the bones of the same creatures found in the mammaliferous deposits of the country bear no marks of teeth? Mr. Granville Penn, however, gets over the difficulty of the cave, which is hollowed, I may mention, in a limestone of the Oolitic series, inclosing the ammonite and belemnite, by asserting that its mammaliferous contents may be somewhat older than itself! The limestone existed, he holds, as but a mere unformed pulp at the time the intertropical animals came floating northwards: they sank into it; the gasses evolved during putrefaction blew up the plastic lime above them into a great oblong bubble, somewhat as a glass-blower blows up a bottle; and hence the Kirkdale cavern, with its gnawed bones and its amazing number of teeth. And certainly a geologic argument of this ingenious character has one signal advantage,—it is in no danger whatever of being answered by the geologists. Mr. Penn, in a second edition of his work, expressed some surprise that an Edinburgh Reviewer should have merely stated his argument without replying to it!!

But I need not dwell on the arguments for a universal deluge which have been derived from the superficial deposits. They all belong to an immature age of geologic science, and are of no value whatever. Let us pass rather to the consideration of the facts and arguments which militate against the universality of the catastrophe.

The form and dimensions of Noah's ark are definitely given in the sacred record. It seems to have been a great oblong box, somewhat like a wooden granary, three stories high, and furnished with a roof apparently of the ordinary angular shape, but with a somewhat broader ridge than common; and it measured three hundred cubits in length, fifty cubits in breadth, and thirty cubits in height. A good deal of controversy has, however, arisen regarding the cubit employed; some holding, with Sir Walter Raleigh, and most of the older theologians, such as Shuckford and Hales, that the Noachian cubit was what is known as the common or natural cubit, "containing," says Sir Walter, "one foot and a half, or a length equal to that of the human fore-arm measured from the sharp of the elbow to the point of the middle finger;" others contending that it was the palm-cubit, "which taketh," adds my authority, "one handful more than the common;" yet others, the royal or Persian cubit of twenty-one inches; and so on; for there are, it seems, five several kinds of cubit to choose from, all differing each from the others. The controversy is one in which there is exceeding little footing for any party. I am inclined, however, to adopt, with Raleigh and Hales, the natural cubit, for the following reason. The given dimensions of the ark form the oldest example of measurement of which we have any record; and all, or almost all, the older and simpler standards of measure bear reference to portions of the human frame. There is the span, the palm, the hand-breadth, the thumb-breadth (or inch), the hair-breadth, and the foot. The simple fisherman on our coasts still measures off his fathoms by stretching out both his arms to the full; the village sempstress still tells off her cloth-breadths by finger-lengths and nails; the untaught tiller of the soil still estimates the area of his little field by pacing along its sides. Man's first and most obvious expedient, when he sets himself to measure, is to employ his own person as his standard; and the first or common cubit was a measure of this natural description equal in length to the extended fore-arm and hand. All the other cubits were artificial compounds of after introduction; and so, in the absence of direct evidence on the point, I accept the most natural and oldest cubit as in all probability the one employed in the oldest recorded piece of cubit measurement. And the ark, if measured by the common or natural cubit, must have been a vessel four hundred and fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in breadth, and forty-five feet in height. Dr. Kitto, however, though we find him remarking that in computations of Scripture measures the cubit may be regarded as half a yard (Sir Walter's estimate), adopts, in his own computation of the size of the ark, without assigning any reason why, the palm-cubit, or cubit of twenty-one inches and nearly nine lines (21.888 inches); and, waving all controversy on the question, let us, for the argument's sake, admit the larger measure. Let us,—however much inclined to hold with Raleigh, Shuckford, and Hales,—agree with Dr. Kitto that the ark was five hundred and forty-seven feet in length, by ninety-one feet in breadth. Such dimensions, multiplied by three, the number of stories in the vessel, would give an area equal to about one seventh that of the great Crystal Palace of 1851. Or, to take a more definite illustration from the same vast building, the area of the three floors of the ark, taken together, would fall short by about twenty-eight thousand square feet of that of the northern gallery of the Palace, which measured one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight feet in length, by ninety-six feet in breadth. And thus, yielding to our opponents their own large measurements, let us now see whether the non-universality of the deluge cannot be fairly predicated from the dimensions of the ark.

I may first remark, however, that measures so definite as those given by Moses (definite, of course, if we waive the doubt regarding the cubit employed) were effectual in setting the arithmeticians to work in all ages of the Church, in order to determine whether all the animals in the world, by sevens and by pairs, with food sufficient to serve them for a twelvemonth, could have been accommodated in the given space. It was a sort of stock problem, that required, it was thought, no very high attainments to solve. Eighty years have not yet passed since kind old Samuel Johnson, in writing to little Miss Thrale a nice little letter, recommending her to be a good girl, and to mind her arithmetic, advised her to try the ark problem. "If you can borrow 'Wilkins' Real Character,'" we find him saying to the young lady, "a folio which perhaps the booksellers can let you have, you will have a very curious calculation, which you are qualified to consider, to show that Noah's ark was capable of holding all the known animals of the world, with provision for all the time in which the earth was under water." Unluckily, however, though the dimensions of the ark were known, the animals of the world were not; and so the question, in at least one of its terms, had to be very frequently restated. Let us take it as we find it presented (drawn, however, from a much older source), in Sir Walter Raleigh's magnificent "History of the World." "If in a ship of such greatness," says this distinguished man, "we seek room for eighty-nine distinct species of beasts, or, lest any should be omitted, for a hundred several kinds, we shall easily find place both for them and for the birds, which in bigness are no way answerable to them, and for meat to sustain them all. For there are three sorts of beasts whose bodies are of a quantity well known; the beef, the sheep, and the wolf; to which the rest may be reduced by saying, according to Aristotle, that one elephant is equal to four beeves, one lion to two wolves, and so of the rest. Of beasts, some feed on vegetables, others on flesh. There are one-and-thirty kinds of the greater sort feeding on vegetables, of which number only three are clean, according to the law of Moses, whereof seven of a kind entered into the ark, namely, three couples for breed, and one odd one for sacrifice; the other eight-and-twenty kinds were 'taken by two of each kind; so that in all there were in the ark one-and-twenty great beasts clean, and six-and-fifty unclean; estimable for largeness as ninety-one beeves; yet, for a supplement (lest, perhaps, any species be omitted), lot them be valued as a hundred and twenty beeves. Of the lesser sort feeding on vegetables were in the ark six-and-twenty kinds, estimable, with good allowance for supply, as fourscore sheep. Of those which devour flesh were two-and-thirty kinds, answerable to threescore and four wolves. All these two hundred and eighty beasts might be kept in one story or room of the ark, in their several cabins; their meat in a second; the birds and their provision in a third, with space to spare for Noah and his family, and all their necessaries." Such was the calculation of the great voyager Raleigh,—a man who had a more practical acquaintance with stowage than perhaps any of the other writers who have speculated on the capabilities of the ark; and his estimate seems sober and judicious. It will be seen, however, that from the vast increase in our knowledge of the mammals which has taken place since the age in which the "History of the World" was written, the calculation which embraced all the eighty-nine known animals of that time would embrace those of but a single centre of creation now; and that the estimate of Sir Walter tells, in consequence, on the side, not of a universal, but of a partial deluge.

As man extended his acquaintance with the mammals, he found their number greatly increasing on his hands. Button, like Raleigh, though a professed naturalist, and a writer of admirable genius, had no very distinct notions of species. He was inclined to question whether even the ass might not be merely a degraded horse; and confounded many of the mammals of the New World with their representative congeners in the Old. And yet, in summing up his history of the mammaliferous division, he could state, that though it included descriptions of "a hundred and thirty-four different species of creatures that suckled their young, many of which had not been observed or described before," it was necessarily incomplete, as there were still others to add to the list, for whose history there existed no materials. At the same time he remarked, however, that the "number of quadruped animals whose existence is certain and well established does not amount to more than two hundred on the surface of the known world." Yet here was the extreme estimate made by Raleigh, with what he deemed large allowance for the unknown animals, fairly doubled; and under the hands of more discriminating naturalists, and in the inevitable course of discovery, the number has so enormously increased, that the "eighty-nine distinct species" known to the great voyager have been represented during the last thirty years by the one thousand mammals of Swainson's estimate, the one thousand one hundred and forty-nine mammals of Charles Bonaparte's estimate, the one thousand two hundred and thirty mammals of Winding's estimate, and the one thousand five hundred mammals of Oken's estimate. In the first edition of the admirable "Physical Atlas" of Johnston (published in 1848) there are one thousand six hundred and twenty-six different species of mammals enumerated; and in the second edition (published in 1856), one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight species. And to this very extraordinary advance on the eighty-nine mammals of Raleigh, and the two hundred mammals of Buffon, we must add the six thousand two hundred and sixty-six birds of Lesson, and the six hundred and fifty-seven reptiles of Charles Bonaparte; or at least,—subtracting the sea snakes, and perhaps the turtles, as fitted to live outside the ark,—his six hundred and forty-two reptiles.[29]

Such is the number of the known vertebrates, exclusive of the fishes, with which in this question we have now to deal. Still, however, there are a few lingering theologians, some of them very intelligent men, who continue to regard the ark as quite big enough for them all. Dr. Hamilton of Mobile, for instance, after fairly stating Swainson's estimate, namely, one thousand mammalia, six thousand birds, and one thousand five hundred reptiles and amphibiae, goes on to say, that "it must not be forgotten, that of all these, the vastly greater proportion are small; and that numbers of them could be placed together in the same compartment of the ark." This, however, permit me to say with all respect, is not meeting the real difficulty. No doubt many of the birds are small,—many of the reptiles are small,—many even of the mammals are small,—many small animals were known in the days of Raleigh, and a much greater number of small animals are known now; but the question proper to the case seems to be, What proportions do both the large and the small animals now known bear to the large and small animals known in the days of Raleigh or Buffon; and how much additional accommodation-room would they require during their supposed voyage of a twelvemonth? There are two different ways in which the list of the known animals has been increased, especially of the known mammals. They have been increased in a certain appreciable proportion by discovery; and as discovery has been made chiefly in islands,—for the great continents had been previously known,—and as the mammals of islands, as has been well remarked by Cuvier, are usually small, of this appreciable proportion the bulk is comparatively not great. The great kangaroo (Macropus giganteus), though the inhabitant of an island which ranks among the continents, would not much exceed in bulk, tried by Raleigh's quaint scale of measurement, a sheep and a half, or at most two sheep; and yet I know not that discovery in the islands has added a larger animal to the previously known ones than the great kangaroo. Mr. Waterhouse, when he published, in 1841, his "History of the Marsupialia," reckoned up one hundred and five distinct species of pouched animals; and eighteen species more,—in all one hundred and twenty-three,—have been since added to the order. With the exception of an opossum or two, all these marsupiata may be regarded as discoveries made since the time of Buffon; most of them, as I have said, are small. And such, generally, has been the nature of the revelations made during the last seventy years by positive discovery. It is not, however, by discovery, but by scientific scrutiny into the true nature and distinctions of species, that the recent enormous increase in the number of the known mammals has mainly taken place. And in these cases it will generally be found that the new species, which had been previously confounded with some old ones, so nearly resemble the latter in bulk, as well as aspect, as to justify in some degree the mistake. Let us take two of the greatest animals as examples,—the elephant and the rhinoceros. Buffon confounded the African with the Asiatic elephant. We now know that they represent two well marked species, Elephas Africanus and Elephas Indicus; and that an ark which contained the ancestors of all the existing animals would require to have its two pair of elephants, not the one pair only which would have been deemed sufficient eighty years ago. Again, with respect to the rhinoceros, Buffon was acquainted with the single horned animal, and had heard of the animal with two horns; and so, though by no means certain that the "variety was constant," he yet held that "two distinct species might possibly be established." But we now know that there are six species of rhinoceros (seven, according to the "Physical Atlas,")—Rh. Indicus, Rh. Javanus, Rh. Sumatrensis, Rh. Africanus, Rh. simus, and Rh. ketloa; and that, instead of possibly four, at least twelve, or more probably fourteen, animals of the genus would require, on the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to have been accommodated in the ark. Buffon even held that the bison of America might be identical with not simply the auroch of Europe, which it closely resembles, but with even the European ox, which it does not resemble. But it is now known, that while the European aurochs are provided by nature with but fourteen pairs of ribs, the American bison is furnished with fifteen. Of each of the ruminants that divide the hoof, there were seven introduced into the ark; and it may be well to mark how, even during the last few years, our acquaintance with this order of animals has been growing, and how greatly the known species, in their relation to human knowledge, have in consequence increased. In 1848 (in the first edition of the "Physical Atlas") Mr. Waterhouse estimated the oxen at thirteen species; in 1856 (in the second edition) he estimates them at twenty. In 1848 he estimated the sheep at twenty-one species; in 1856 he estimates them at twenty-seven. In 1848 he estimated the goats at fourteen species; in 1856 he estimates them at twenty. In 1846 he estimated the deer at thirty-eight species; in 1856 he estimates them at fifty-one. In short, if, excluding the lamas and the musks as doubtfully clean, tried by the Mosaic test, we but add to the sheep, goats, deer, and cattle, the forty-eight species of unequivocally clean antelopes, and multiply the whole by seven, we shall have as the result a sum total of one thousand one hundred and sixty-two individuals,—a number more than four times greater than that for which Raleigh made provision in the ark, and considerably more than twice greater than that provided for by the students of Buffon. Such is the nature and amount of the increase which has taken place during the last half century in the mammaliferous fauna. In so great a majority of cases has it increased its bulk in the ratio in which it has increased its numbers, that if one ark was not deemed more than sufficient to accommodate the animal world known to the French naturalist of eighty years ago, it would require at least from five to six arks to accommodate the animal world known in the present day.

Even in the days of Buffon, however, and at a still earlier period, the ark, regarded as a natural means of preservation from death by drowning, was usually coupled, in the case of at least the carnivorous animals, with certain miraculous provisions against death by starving. It seems to have been generally taken for granted, that the flesh-eating animals, when introduced to the shelter of the ark, entirely changed the nature indicated by their form of teeth, the character of their stomachs, and the shortness of their bowels, and fed, for the time they remained in it, exclusively on vegetable substances, which, in ordinary circumstances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle. Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, which refer to a class of wild animals whose real destiny is rather, it would seem, to be extirpated than to be changed, coupled with the belief, now no longer tenable, that there was a time, ere man had sinned, when there was no death among the inferior creatures, and of course no eaters of flesh, rendered the belief easy of reception; but it involved a miracle nowhere recorded; and the burden of the proof that such a miracle actually took place in the circumstances lies of necessity on the assertors of a universal deluge. Further, of even the creatures that live on vegetables, many are restricted in their food to single plants, which are themselves restricted to limited localities and remote regions of the globe. Dr. Hamilton has not referred, in his list of animals, to the insects,—a class which, though they were estimated in 1842 to consist of no fewer than five hundred and fifty thousand species, might yet be accommodated in a comparatively limited space. But how extraordinary an amount of miracle would it not require to bring them all together into any one centre, or to preserve them there! Many of them, like the myriapoda and the thysanura, have no wings, and but feeble locomotive powers; many of them, such as the ephemera and the male ants, live after they have got their wings only a few hours, or at most a few days; and there are myriads of them that can live upon but single plants that grow in very limited botanic centres. Even supposing them all brought into the ark by miracle as eggs, what multitudes of them would not, without the exertion of further miracle, require to be sent back to their proper habitats as wingless grubs, or as insects restricted by nature to a few days of life! Or, supposing the eggs all left in their several localities to lie under water for a twelvemonth amid mud and debris,—though certain of the hardier kinds might survive such treatment, by miracle alone could the preponderating majority of the class be preserved. And be it remembered, that the expedient of having recourse to supposititious miracle in order to get over a difficulty insurmountable on every natural principle, is not of the nature of argument, but simply an evidence of the want of it. Argument is at an end when supposititious miracle is introduced.

But the very inadequate size of the ark, though a conclusive proof that all, or nearly all, the progenitors of our existing animals could not have harbored within it from any general cataclysm, does not furnish a stronger argument against the possibility of any such assemblage, than the peculiar manner in which we now find these animals distributed over the earth's surface. Linnaeus held, early in the last century, that all creatures which now inhabit the globe had proceeded originally from some such common centre as the ark might have furnished; but no zoologist acquainted with the distribution of species can acquiesce in any such conclusion now. We now know that every great continent has its own peculiar fauna; that the original centres of distribution must have been, not one, but many; further, that the areas or circles around these centres must have been occupied by their pristine animals in ages long anterior to that of the Noachian Deluge; nay, that in even the latter geologic ages, they were preceded in them by animals of the same general type. There are fourteen such areas or provinces enumerated by the later naturalists. It may be well, however, instead of running any risk of losing ourselves amid the less nicely defined provinces of the Old World, to draw our illustrations from two and a half provinces of later discovery, whose limits have been rigidly fixed by nature. "The great continents," says Cuvier, "contain species peculiar to each; insomuch that whenever large countries of this description have been discovered, which their situation had kept isolated from the rest of the world, the class of quadrupeds which they contained has been found extremely different from any that had existed elsewhere. Thus, when the Spaniards first penetrated into South America, they did not find a single species of quadruped the same as any of Europe, Asia, or Africa. The puma, the jaguar, the tapir, the cabiai, the lama, the vicuna, the sloths, the armadilloes, the opossums, and the whole tribe of sapajous, were to them entirely new animals, of which they had no idea. Similar circumstances have recurred in our own time, when the coasts of New Holland and the adjacent islands were first explored. The various species of kangaroo, phascolomys, dasyurus, and perameles, the flying phalangers, the ornithorynchi, and echidnae, have astonished naturalists by the strangeness of their conformations, which presented proportions contrary to all former rules, and were incapable of being arranged under any of the systems then in use." New Zealand, though singularly devoid of indigenous mammals and reptiles,—for the only native mammal seems to be a peculiar species of rat, and the only native reptile a small, harmless lizard,—has a scarce less remarkable fauna than either of these great continents. It consists almost exclusively of birds, some of them so ill provided with wings, that, like the wika of the natives, they can only run along the ground. And it is a most significant fact, that both in the two great continents and the New Zealand islands there existed, in the later geologic ages, extinct faunas that bore the peculiar generic characters by which their recent ones are still distinguished. The sloths and armadilloes of South America had their gigantic predecessors in the enormous megatherium and mylodon, and the strongly armed glyptodon; the kangaroos and wombats of Australia had their extinct predecessors in a kangaroo nearly twice the size of the largest living species, and in so huge a wombat, that its bones have been mistaken for those of the hippopotamus; and the ornithic inhabitants of New Zealand had their predecessors in the monstrous birds, such as the dinornis, the aptornis, and the palapteryx,—wingless creatures like the ostrich, that stood from six to twelve feet in height. In these several regions two generations of species of the genera peculiar to them have existed,—the recent generation by whose descendants they are still inhabited, and the extinct gigantic generation, whose remains we find locked up in their soils and caves. But how are such facts reconcileable with the hypothesis of a universal deluge?



The deluge was an event of the existing creation. Had it been universal, it would either have broken up all the diverse centres, and substituted one great general centre instead,—that in which the ark rested; or else, at an enormous expense of miracle, all the animals preserved by natural means by Noah would have had to be returned by supernatural means to the regions whence by means equally supernatural they had been brought. The sloths and armadilloes,—little fitted by nature for long journeys,—would have required to be ferried across the Atlantic to the regions in which the remains of the megatherium and glyptodon lie entombed; the kangaroo and wombat, to the insulated continent that contains the bones of the extinct macropus and phalcolomys; and the New Zealand birds, including its heavy flying quails and its wingless wood-hen, to those remote islands of the Pacific in which the skeletons of Palapteryx ingens and Dinornus giganteus lie entombed. Nor will it avail aught to urge, with certain assertors of a universal deluge, that during the cataclysm, sea and land changed their places, and that what is now land had formed the bottom of the antediluvian ocean, and, vice versa, what is now sea had been the land on which the first human inhabitants of the earth increased and multiplied. No geologist who knows how very various the ages of the several table-lands and mountain chains in reality are could acquiesce in such an hypothesis; our own Scottish shores,—if to the term of the existing we add that of the ancient coast line,—must have formed the limits of the land from a time vastly more remote than the age of the deluge. But even supposing, for the argument's sake, the hypothesis recognized as admissible, what, in the circumstances of the case, would be gained by the admission? A continuous tract of land would have stretched,—when all the oceans were continents and all the continents oceans,—between the South American and the Asiatic coasts. And it is just possible that, during the hundred and twenty years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, from where the skeletons of the great megatheria are buried, to where the great vessel stood. But after the Flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land had taken place, there would remain for them no longer a roadway; and so, though their journey outwards might, in all save the impulse which led to it, have been altogether a natural one, their voyage homewards could not be other than miraculous. Nor would the exertion of miracle have had to be restricted to the transport of the remoter travellers. How, we may well ask, had the Flood been universal, could even such islands as Great Britain and Ireland have ever been replenished with many of their original inhabitants? Even supposing it possible that animals, such as the red deer and the native ox might have swam across the Straits of Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits in which the bones and horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed long ages before, the feat would have been surely far beyond the power of such feeble natives of the soil as the mole, the hedgehog, the shrew, the dormouse, and the field-vole.

Dr. Pye Smith, in dealing with this subject, has emphatically said, that "all land animals having their geographical regions, to which their constitutional natures are congenial,—many of them being unable to live in any other situation,—we cannot represent to ourselves the idea of their being brought into one small spot from the polar regions, the torrid zone, and all the other climates of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, Australia, and the thousands of islands,—their preservation and provision, and the final disposal of them,—without bringing up the idea of miracles more stupendous than any that are recorded in Scripture. The great decisive miracle of Christianity," he adds,—"the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,—sinks down before it." And let us remember that the preservation and redistribution of the land animals would demand but a portion of the amount of miracle absolutely necessary for the preservation, in the circumstances, of the entire fauna of the globe. The fresh water fishes, molluscs, crustacea, and zoophytes, could be kept alive in a universal deluge only by miraculous means. It has been urged that, though the living individuals were to perish, their spawn might be preserved by natural means. It must be remembered, however, that even of some fishes whose proper habitat is the sea, such as the salmon, it is essential for the maintenance of the species that the spawn should be deposited in fresh water, nay, in running fresh water; for in still water, however pure, the eggs in a few weeks addle and die. The eggs of the common trout also require to be deposited in running fresh water; while other fresh water fishes, such as the tench and carp, are reared most successfully in still, reedy ponds. The fresh water fishes spawn, too, at very different seasons, and the young remain for very different periods in the egg. The perch and grayling spawn in the end of April or the beginning of May; the tench and roach about the middle of June; the common trout and powan in October and November. And while some fishes, such as the salmon, remain from ninety to a hundred days in the egg, others, such as the trout, are extruded in five weeks. Without special miracle the spawn of all the fresh water fishes could not be in existence as such at one and the same time; without special miracle it could not maintain its vitality in a universal deluge; and without special miracle, even did it maintain its vitality, it could not remain in the egg state throughout an entire twelvemonth, but would be developed into fishes of the several species to which it belonged at very different periods. Further, in a universal deluge, without special miracle vast numbers of even the salt water animals could not fail to be extirpated; in particular, almost all the molluscs of the littoral and laminarian zones. Nor would the vegetable kingdom fare greatly better than the animal one. Of the one hundred thousand species of known plants, few indeed would survive submersion for a twelvemonth; nor would the seeds of most of the others fare better than the plants themselves. There are certain hardy seeds that in favorable circumstances maintain their vitality for ages; and there are others, strongly encased in water-tight shells or skins, that have floated across oceans to germinate in distant islands; but such, as every florist knows, is not the general character of seeds; and not until after many unsuccessful attempts, and many expedients had been resorted to, have the more delicate kinds been brought uninjured, even on shipboard, from distant countries to our own. It is not too much to hold that, without special miracle, at least three fourths of the terrestrial vegetation of the globe would have perished in a universal deluge that covered over the dry land for a year. Assuredly the various vegetable centres or regions,—estimated by Schouw at twenty-five,—bear witness to no such catastrophe. Still distinct and unbroken, as of old, either no effacing flood has passed over them, or they were shielded from its effects at an expense of miracle many times more considerable than that at which the Jews were brought out of Egypt and preserved amid the nations, or Christianity itself was ultimately established.[30]

There is, however, a class of learned and thoroughly respectable theologians who seem disposed to accept rather of any amount of unrecorded miracle, than to admit of a merely partial deluge, coextensive with but the human family. "Were the difficulty attending this subject tenfold greater, and seemingly beyond all satisfactory explanation," says Dr. William Hamilton, "if I yet find it recorded in the Book of Revelation, that in the deluge 'every living thing in which is the breath of life perished, and Noah only remained alive, and they which were with him in the ark,' I could still believe it implicitly, satisfied that the difficulty of explanation springs solely from the imperfection of human knowledge, and not from any limitation in the power or the wisdom of God, nor yet from any lack of trustworthiness in the document given us in a revelation from God,—a document given to men by the hands of Moses, the learned, accomplished, and eminently devout Jewish legislator." Here again, however, Dr. Hamilton seems to have mistaken the question actually at issue. The true question is, not whether or no Moses is to be believed in the matter, but whether or no we in reality understand Moses. The question is, whether we are to regard the passages in which he describes the Flood as universal, as belonging to the very numerous metonymic texts of Scripture in which a part—sometimes a not very large part—is described as the whole, or to regard them as strictly and severely literal. Or, in other words, whether we are, with learned and solid divines of the olden time, such as Poole and Stillingfleet, and with many ingenious and accomplished divines of the passing age, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith and the Rev. Professor Hitchcock, to regard these passages as merely metonymic; or, with Drs. Hamilton and Kitto, to regard them as strictly literal, and to call up in support of the literal reading an amount of supposititious miracle, compared with which all the recorded miracles of the Old and New Testaments sink into insignificance. The controversy does not lie between Moses and the naturalists, but between the readings of theologians such as Matthew Poole and Stillingfleet on the one hand, and the readings of theologians such as Drs. Hamilton and Kitto on the other. And finding all natural science arrayed against the conclusions of the one class, and in favor of those of the other, and believing, further, that there has been always such a marked economy shown in the exercise of miraculous powers, that there has never been more of miracle employed in any one of the dispensations than was needed,[31] I must hold that the theologians who believe that the deluge was but coextensive with the moral purpose which it served are more in the right, and may be more safely followed, than the theologians who hold that it extended greatly further than was necessary. It is not with Moses or the truth of revelation that our controversy lies, but with the opponents of Stillingfleet and of Poole.

To only one of the other arguments employed in this controversy need I at all refer. The cones of volcanic craters are formed of loose incoherent scoriae and ashes, and, when exposed, as in the case of submarine volcanoes, such as Graham's Island and the islands of Nyoe and Sabrina, to the denuding force of waves and currents, they have in a few weeks, or at most a few months, been washed completely away. And yet in various parts of the world, such as Auvergne in central France, and along the flanks of Aetna, there are cones of long extinct or long slumbering volcanoes, which, though of at least triple the antiquity of the Noachian deluge, and though composed of the ordinary incoherent materials, exhibit no marks of denudation. According to the calculations of Sir Charles Lyell, no devastating flood could have passed over the forest zone of Aetna during the last twelve thousand years,—for such is the antiquity which he assigns to its older lateral cones, that retain in integrity their original shape; and the volcanic cones of Auvergne, which inclose in their ashes the remains of extinct animals, and present an outline as perfect as those of Aetna, are deemed older still. Graham Island arose out of the sea early in July, 1831; in the beginning of the following August it had attained to a circumference of three miles, and to a height of two hundred feet; and yet in less than three months from that time the waves had washed its immense mass down to the sea level; and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dangerous shoal. And such inevitably would have been the fate of the equally incoherent cone-like craters of Aetna and Auvergne during the seven and a half months that intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, had they been included within the area of the deluge. It is estimated that even the newer Auvergne lavas are as old as the times of the Miocene. It is at least a demonstrable fact, that the slow action of streams had hollowed them in several places into deep chasms nearly two thousand years ago; for the remains of Roman works of about that age survive, to show that they had then, as now, to be spanned over by bridges, and that baths had been erected in their denuded recesses; and yet the craters out of which these lavas had flowed retain well nigh all their original sharpness of outline. No wave ever dashed against their symmetrically sloping sides. Now, I have in no instance seen the argument derivable from this class of facts fairly met. The supposed mistake of the Canonico Recupero, or rather of Brydone, who argued that the "lowest of a series of seven distinct lavas of Aetna, most of them covered by thick intervening beds of rich earth, must have been fourteen thousand years old," has been often referred to in the controversy. Brydone or the Canon mistook, it has been said, beds of brown ashes, each of which might have been deposited during a single shower, for beds of rich earth, each of which would have taken centuries to form. The oldest of the series of lava beds, therefore, instead of being fourteen thousand, might be scarce fourteen hundred years old. And if Brydone or the Canon were thus mistaken in their calculations, why may not the modern geologists be also mistaken in theirs? Now, altogether waiving the question as to whether the ingenious traveller of eighty-six years ago was or was not mistaken in his estimate,—for to those acquainted with geologic fact in general, or more particularly with the elaborate descriptions of Aetna given during the last thirty years by Elie de Beaumont, Hoffmann, and Sir Charles Lyell, the facts of Brydone, in their bearing on either the age of the earth or the age of the mountain, can well be spared,—waiving, I say, the question whether the traveller was in reality in mistake, I must be permitted to remark, that the concurrent testimony of geologists cannot in fairness be placed on the same level as the testimony of a man who, though accomplished and intelligent, was not only no geologist, but who observed and described ere geology had any existence as a science. Further, I must be allowed to add, that geology is now a science; and that individuals unacquainted with it in its character as such place themselves in positions greatly more perilous than they seem to think, when they enter on the field of argument with men who for many years have made it a subject of special study. It is not by "bidding down" the age of the extinct or quiescent volcanoes by a species of blind haggling, or by presuming mistake in the calculations regarding them, simply because mistakes are possible and have sometimes been made, that that portion of the cumulative evidence against a universal deluge which they furnish is to be neutralized or set aside. The argument on the general question is a cumulative one; and while many of its component portions are of themselves so conclusive, that only supposititious miracle, and not presentable argument, can be arrayed against them, its aggregate force seems wholly irresistible. In passing, however, from the facts and reasonings that bear against the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to indicate in a few sentences both the possible mode in which a merely partial flood might have taken place, and the probable extent of area which it covered, I shall have to remove from very strong to comparatively weak ground,—from what can be maintained as argument, to what can at best be but offered as conjecture.

There is a remarkable portion of the globe, chiefly in the Asiatic continent, though it extends into Europe, and which is nearly equal to all Europe in area, whose rivers (some of them, such as the Volga, the Oural, the Sihon, the Kour, and the Amoo, of great size) do not fall into the ocean, or into any of the many seas which communicate with it. They are, on the contrary, all turned inwards, if I may so express myself; losing themselves, in the eastern parts of the tract, in the lakes of a rainless district, in which they supply but the waste of evaporation, and falling, in the western parts, into seas such as the Caspian and the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still under the level of the ocean. The shore line of the Caspian, for instance, is rather more than eighty-three feet beneath that of the Black Sea; and some of the great flat steppes which spread out around it, such as what is known as the Steppe of Astracan, have a mean level of about thirty feet beneath that of the Baltic. Were there a trench-like strip of country that communicated between the Caspian and the Gulf of Finland to be depressed beneath the level of the latter sea, it would so open up the fountains of the great deep as to lay under water an extensive and populous region, containing the cities of Astracan and Astrabad, and many other towns and villages. Nor is it unworthy of remark, surely, that one of the depressed steppes of this peculiar region is known as the "Low Steppe of the Caucasus," and forms no inconsiderable portion of the great recognized centre of the human family. The Mount Ararat on which, according to many of our commentators, the ark rested, rises immediately on the western edge of this great hollow; the Mount Ararat selected as the scene of that event by Sir Walter Raleigh, certainly not without some show of reason, lies far within it. Vast plains, white with salt, and charged with sea shells, show that the Caspian Sea was at no distant period greatly more extensive than it is now. In an outer region, which includes the vast desert of Khiva, shells also abound; but they seem to belong, as a group, rather to some of the later Tertiary eras than to the recent period. It is quite possible, however, that,—as on parts of the western shores of our own country, where recent marine deposits lie over marine deposits of the Pleistocene age, while a terrestrial deposit, representative of an intervening paroxysm of upheaval, lies between,—it is possible, I say, that in this great depressed area, the region covered of old by a Tertiary sea, which we know united the Sea of Aral with the Caspian, and rolled over many a wide steppe and vast plain, may have been again covered for a brief period (after ages of upheaval) by the breaking in of the great deep during that season of judgment when, with the exception of one family, the whole human race was destroyed. It seems confirmatory of this view, that during even the historic period, at least one of the neighboring inland seas, though it belongs to a different system from that of the Caspian and the Aral, covered a vastly greater area than it does now,—a consequence, apparently, of a more considerable depression in the Caucasian region than at present exists. Herodotus, as quoted by Cuvier in his "Theory of the Earth," represents the Sea of Azoff as equal in extent to the Euxine.

With the known facts, then, regarding this depressed Asiatic region before us, let us see whether we cannot originate a theory of the Deluge free from at least the palpable monstrosities of the older ones. Let us suppose that the human family, still amounting to several millions, though greatly reduced by exterminating wars and exhausting vices, were congregated in that tract of country which, extending eastwards from the modern Ararat to far beyond the Sea of Aral, includes the original Caucasian centre of the race: let us suppose that, the hour of judgment having at length arrived, the land began gradually to sink, as the tract in the run of Cutch sank in the year 1819, or as the tract in the southern part of North America, known as the "sunk country," sank in the year 1821: further, let us suppose that the depression took place slowly and equably for forty days together, at the rate of about four hundred feet per day,—a rate not twice greater than that at which the tide rises in the Straits of Magellan, and which would have rendered itself apparent as but a persistent inward flowing of the sea: let us yet further suppose, that from mayhap some volcanic outburst coincident with the depression, and an effect of the same deep seated cause, the atmosphere was so affected, that heavy drenching rains continued to descend during the whole time, and that, though they could contribute but little to the actual volume of the flood,—at most only some five or six inches per day,—they at least seemed to constitute one of its main causes, and added greatly to its terrors, by swelling the rivers, and rushing downwards in torrents from the hills. The depression, which, by extending to the Euxine Sea and the Persian Gulf on the one hand, and to the Gulf of Finland on the other, would open up by three separate channels the fountains of the great deep, and which included, let us suppose, an area of about two thousand miles each way, would, at the end of the fortieth day, be sunk in its centre to the depth of sixteen thousand feet,—a depth sufficiently profound to bury the loftiest mountains of the district; and yet, having a gradient of declination of but sixteen feet per mile, the contour of its hills and plains would remain apparently what they had been before,—the doomed inhabitants would see but the water rising along the mountain sides, and one refuge after another swept away, till the last witness of the scene would have perished, and the last hill-top would have disappeared. And when, after a hundred and fifty days had come and gone, the depressed hollow would have begun slowly to rise,—and when, after the fifth month had passed, the ark would have grounded on the summit of Mount Ararat,—all that could have been seen from the upper window of the vessel would be simply a boundless sea, roughened by tides, now flowing outwards, with a reversed course, towards the distant ocean, by the three great outlets which, during the period of depression, had given access to the waters. Noah would of course see that "the fountains of the deep were stopped," and "the waters returning from off the earth continually;" but whether the Deluge had been partial or universal, he could neither see nor know. His prospect in either case would have been equally that described by the poet Bowles:—

"The mighty ark Rests upon Ararat; but nought around Its inmates can behold, save o'er the expanse Of boundless waters the sun's orient orb Stretching the hull's long shadow, or the moon In silence through the silver-curtained clouds Sailing, as she herself were lost and left In hollow loneliness."

Let me further remark, that in one important sense a partial Flood, such as the one of which I have conceived as adequate to the destruction, in an early age, of the whole human family, could scarce be regarded as miraculous. Several of our first geologists hold, that some of the formidable cataclysms of the remote past may have been occasioned by the sudden upheaval of vast continents, which, by displacing great bodies of water, and rolling them outwards in the character of enormous waves, inundated wide regions elevated hundreds of feet over the sea level, and strewed them over with the rock boulders, clays, gravels, and organic debris of deep sea bottoms. And these cataclysms they regard as perfectly natural, though of course very unusual, events. Nor would the gradual depression of a continent, or, as in the supposed case, of a portion of a continent, be in any degree less natural than the sudden upheaval of a continent. It would, on the contrary, be much more according to experience. Nay, were such a depression and elevation of the great Asiatic basin to take place during the coming twelvemonth as that of which I have conceived as the probable cause of the Deluge, though the geologists would have to describe it as beyond comparison the most remarkable oscillation of level which had taken place within the historic period, they would certainly regard it as no more miraculous than the great earthquake of Lisbon, or than that exhibition of the volcanic forces which elevated the mountain of Jorullo in a single night sixteen hundred feet over the plain. And why have recourse, in speculating on the real event of four thousand years ago, to supposititious miracle, if an event of apparently the same kind would not be regarded as miraculous now? May we not in this matter take our stand beside the poet, who, when recognizing a Providence in the great Calabrian earthquake, and in the overwhelming wave by which it was accompanied, pertinently inquired of the skeptics,—

"Has not God Still wrought by means since first he made the world? And did he not of old employ his means To drown it? What is his creation less Than a capacious reservoir of means, Formed for his use, and ready at his will?"

The revelation to Noah, which warned him of a coming Flood, and taught him how to prepare for it, was evidently miraculous: the Flood itself may have been purely providential. But on this part of the subject I need not dwell. I have accomplished my purpose if I have shown, as was attempted of old by divines such as Stillingfleet and Poole, that there "seems to be no reason why the Deluge should be extended beyond the occasion of it, which was the corruption of man," but, on the contrary, much reason against it; and that, on the other hand, a Flood restricted and partial, and yet sufficient to destroy the race in an early age, while still congregating in their original centre, cannot be regarded as by any means an incredible event. The incredibility lies in the mere human glosses and misinterpretations in which its history has been enveloped. Divested of these, and viewed in its connection with those wonderful traditions which still float all over the world regarding it, it forms, not one of the stumbling-blocks, but one of the evidences, of our faith; and renders the exercise a not unprofitable one, when, according to the poet,—

"Back through the dusk Of ages Contemplation turns her view, To mark, as from its infancy, the world Peopled again from that mysterious shrine That rested on the top of Ararat."



LECTURE NINTH.

THE DISCOVERABLE AND THE REVEALED.

It seems natural, nay, inevitable, that false revelations, which have descended from remote, unscientific ages, should be committed to a false science. Natural phenomena, when of an extraordinary character, powerfully impress the untutored mind. In operating, through the curiosity or the fears of men, upon that instinct of humanity—never wholly inactive in even the rudest state—which cannot witness any remarkable effect without seeking to connect it with its producing cause, they excite into activity in the search the imaginative faculty,—always of earlier development than the judgment in both peoples and individuals, and which never fails, when so employed, to conduct to delusions and extravagances. And this state of mind gives birth simultaneously to both false religion and false science. Great tempests, inundations, eclipses, earthquakes, thunder and lightning, famine and pestilence, the births of monsters, or the rare visitation of strange fishes or wild animals, come all to be included in the mythologic domain. Even the untutored Indian "sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind." And when an order of priesthood springs up, a portion of the leisure of the class is usually employed in speculating on these phenomena; and to their speculations they give the form of direct revelation. Thus almost all the false religions of the old world—not grafted, like Mohammedanism, on the true one—have their pretended revelations regarding the form, structure, and origin of the earth, the mechanism of the heavens, the electric and meteoric phenomena, and even the arrangement of oceans and continents on the surface of our planet.

The old extinct forms of heathenism,—Etrurian, Egyptian, Phoenician, and Babylonian,—had all their cosmogonies.[32] In the wild mythology of ancient Scandinavia, of which we find such distinct traces in the languages and superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our own country continues to give the names of its uncouth deities to the days of our week, there is a strange genesis of not only the heavens and earth, but of the gods also. It has, besides, its scheme of the universe in its great mundane tree of three vast roots,—celestial, terrestrial, and infernal,—which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all things. The leading religions of the East which still survive, such as Buddhism, Brahminism, and Parseeism, have all their astronomy, geography, meteorology, and geology, existing as component parts of their several systems. Nor have there been wanting ingenious men who, though little tolerant of the various attempts made to reconcile the Mosaic account of creation with the discoveries of modern science, have looked with a favorable eye on the wild science of the false religions, and professed to detect in it at least striking analogies with the deductions of both the geologist and the astronomer. When the skeptical wits of the last century wished to produce, by way of foil, a morality vastly superior, as they said, to that of Christianity, they had recourse to the Brahmins and the Chinese. And though we hear less of the ethics of these people since we have come to know them better, we are still occasionally reminded of the superiority of their science. Hinduism has been regarded as furnishing examples of the geologic doctrine of a succession of creations extended over immensely protracted geologic periods; and Buddhism represented as charged with both the geologic doctrine and the perhaps less certain astronomic deduction of a plurality of worlds. And before entering on our general argument, it may be well to show by specimen what mere chance hits these are, and how enormous the amount of the nonsense and absurdity really is in which they are set.

When Brahma, wearied with the work of producing and maintaining the universe, goes to sleep, say the Hindus,—an occurrence which happens at the end of every four millions of years,—a deluge of water rises high above the sun and moon, and the worlds and their inhabitants are destroyed. When he awakes, however, he immediately sets himself to produce anew; and another universe springs up, consisting, like the former one, of ten worlds placed over each other, like the stories of a tall building, and replenished with plants and animals. Of these our own world is the eighth in number, reckoning from the ground floor upwards; there are seven worlds worse than itself beneath it, and two better ones above; with a few worlds more higher up still, to which the destroying flood does not reach, save once or twice in an eternity or so; and which, in consequence, have not to be re-created each time with the others. The special forms which the upper and nether worlds exhibit do not seem to be very well known; but that which man inhabits is "flat, like the flower of the water-lily, in which the petals project beyond each other;" and it has in all, including sea and land, a diameter of several hundred thousand millions of miles. It has its many great oceans,—one of these (unfortunately the only one in contact with man's place of habitation) of salt water, one of sugar-cane juice, one of spirituous liquor, one of clarified butter, and one of sour curds. It has, besides, its very great ocean of sweet water. And around all, forming a sort of gigantic hoop or ring, there extends a continent of pure gold. Of all the luminaries that rise over this huge world, the sun is the nearest: the distance of the moon is twice as great; the lesser fixed stars occur immediately beyond; then Mercury, then Venus, then Mars, then Jupiter, then Saturn; and finally, the great bear and the polar star. And such is that cosmogony and astronomy of the Brahmins to which their religion, in its character as a revelation, stands committed, and in which a very lenient criticism has found the geologic revolutions. Let me draw my next illustration from Buddhism, the most ancient and most widely spread religion of the East; for, though partially overlaid in the great Indian peninsula by the more modern monstrosities of Brahminism, it extends in one direction from the Persian Gulf to Formosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms of heathenism darken so large a portion of the map as Buddhism,—a superstition which is estimated to include within its pale nearly one third of the whole human species.

It has been held, I need scarce say, by most astronomers since the times of Newton, that the universe consists of innumerable systems of worlds, furnished each with its own sun; and held by most geologists during the last fifty years, that the past duration of our earth was divided into periods of vast extent, each of which had a creation of its own. And certainly in Buddhism we find both these ideas,—the idea of the existence of separate systems, each with its own sun; and the idea of successive periods, each with its own creation. We ascertain on examination; however, that in the superstition they are not scientific ideas at all, but mere chance guesses, set, like those of Brahminism, in a farago of wild and monstrous fable. Each of the many systems of which the universe is composed consists, say the Buddhists, of three worlds of a circular form, joined together at the edges, so that there intervenes between them an angular interspace, which constitutes their common hell; and to each of these systems there is a sun and moon apportioned, that take their daily journeys over them, returning at night through a void space underneath. And each of the bygone successive creations was a creation originated, it is added, out of chaos, through the stored-up merits of the Buddhas, and the effects of a life-invigorating rain, and which sank into chaos again when the old stock of merit, accumulated in the previous period, was exhausted. The creatures of each period, too, whether brute or human, were animated by but the souls of former creatures embodied anew. In the centre of each of the three worlds of which a system or sackwala consists, there is a vast mountain, more than forty thousand miles in height, surrounded by a circular sea, which is in turn surrounded by a ring of land and rock. Another circular sea lies outside the ring, and a second solid ring outside the sea; and thus rings of land and water alternate from the centre to the circumference. According to the geography of the Buddhas, a model of our own earth would exactly resemble that old-fashioned ornament,—a work of the turning-lathe,—which some of my auditors must have seen roughening the upper board of the ornate parlor bellows of the last century, and which consisted of a large central knob, surrounded by alternate circular rings and furrows. And as in the old-fashioned bellows each ring flattened, and each furrow became shallower, in proportion as it was removed from the centre, so in the Buddhist earth, the seas, from being many thousand miles deep in the inner rings, shallow so greatly, that in the outer rings their depth is only an inch; while the continents, from being forty thousand miles high, sink into mere plains, almost on the level of the surrounding ocean. Such is the geography to which this religion pledges itself. Its astronomy, on the other hand, is not quite so bad as that to which Father Cullen has affixed his imprimatur, seeing that, though it gives the same sort of diurnal journey to the sun, it confers upon it a diameter, not of only six feet, but of four hundred miles. Nor is its geology a great deal worse than that of many Christians. It makes the earth consist, reckoning from its foundations upwards, of a layer of wind, a layer of water, a layer of substance resembling honey, a layer of rock, and a layer of soil. Such is a small portion of the natural science of Buddhism: the minute details of its monstrous cosmogony, with its descriptions of fabulous oceans, inhabited by fishes thousands of miles in length, and of wonderful forests abounding in trees four hundred miles high, and haunted by singing lions that leap two miles at a bound, occupy many chapters of the sacred volumes. Every form of faith has its heretics; and there are, it would seem, heretics among even the Buddhists, who, instead of adopting the nonsense of the priests in this physical department, originate a nonsense equally great of their own. The error of concluding that the worlds of the universe are finite in number, say the sacred books, is the heresy antawada; the error of concluding that the world itself is infinite is the heresy anantawada; the error of concluding that the world is finite vertically but infinite horizontally is the heresy anantanantawada; and the error of concluding the world to be neither finite nor infinite is the heresy nawantanantawada. A name equally formidable would be, of course, found for the students of modern astronomy and the other kindred sciences, among the professed believers in Buddh, did not these contrive to get over the difficulty by observing, "that certain things, as stated in the Sastras, must have been so formerly; but great changes have taken place in these in latter times; and for astronomical purposes astronomical rules must be followed."

Believers in Buddhism may be still found by tens of millions on the shores of the Yellow Sea. Let me select my third specimen of a universe-fashioning mythology from a faith, long since extinct, that had its seat on the opposite side of the Old World, along the coasts of the Northern Atlantic. The old Teutonic religion professed to reveal, like that of Buddh and of Brahma, how the heavens and earth were formed, and of what. Ymir, the great frost-giant, a being mysteriously engendered out of frozen vapor, was slain by the god Odin and his brothers; and, dragging his body into the middle of the universe, they employed the materials of which it was composed in forming the earth. Of his blood they made the vast ocean, and all the lakes and rivers; of his flesh they constructed the land, placing it in the midst of the waters; of his bones they built up the mountains; his teeth and jaws they broke up into the stones and pebbles of the earth and shore; of his great skull they fashioned the vault of the heavens; and, tossing his brains into the air, they became the clouds. Earth, sea, and sky, however, thus made, were supported by the great ash-tree Yggdrasill, which, with its roots anchored deep in the primordial abyss, rose up through the vast central mountains of the world, and, stretching forth its branches to the furthest heaven, bore the stars as its fruit. Encircling the whole earth like a ring, lay the huge snake Midgard,—always hidden in the sea, save when half drawn forth on one occasion by the god Thor; outside the snake a broader ring of ice-mountains swept round both land and ocean, and formed the outer frame of the world,—for there lay only blank space beyond; and over all, the sun and moon performed their journeys, chased through the sky by ravenous wolves, that ever sought to devour them. Such was the wild dream of our Scandinavian ancestors,—a dream, however, that occupied as prominent a place in their Edda as any of their other religious beliefs, and which, with the first dawn of science, would not only have fallen itself, but would have also dragged down the others along with it.

Now this physical department has ever proved the vulnerable portion of false religions,—the portion which, if I may use the metaphor, their originators could not dip in the infernal river. The ability of drawing the line, in the early and ignorant ages of the world, between what man can of himself discover and what he cannot, is an ability which man cannot possibly possess. The ancient Chaldeans, who first watched the motions of the planets, could not possibly have foreseen, that while on the one hand men would be one day able of themselves to measure and weigh these bodies, and to determine their distances from the earth and from each other, men might never be able of themselves to demonstrate the fact of their authorship, or to discover the true character of their author. Nay, if they could have at all thought on the subject, the latter would have seemed to them by much the simpler discovery of the two. To know at such a time what was in reality discoverable and what was not, would be to know by anticipation what is not yet known,—the limits of all human knowledge. It would be to trace a line non-existent at the period, and untraceable, in the nature of things, until the history of the human race shall be completed. It was held by even the sagacious Socrates, that men cannot arrive at any certainty in questions respecting the form or motion of the earth, or the mechanism of the heavens; and so he set himself to elucidate what he deemed much simpler matters,—to prove, for instance, as we find in the Phedon, that human souls existed ere they came to inhabit their mortal bodies, and retained faint recollections of great misfortunes that had overtaken them ere their embodiment as men, and of sufferings to which they had been subjected in a primevous state. And lacking this ability of distinguishing between the naturally discoverable and what cannot be naturally discovered, the originators of the old mythologic beliefs obtruded into provinces in which ultimately the lawless nature of the obtrusion could not fail to be detected; and thus, by making their false science a portion of their false religion, they created what was afterwards to prove its weakest and most vulnerable part. We absolutely know that the course at present pursued by enlightened Christian missionaries in India is to bring scientific truth into direct antagonism with the monstrously false science of the pretended revelations of Parseeism, Brahminism, and Buddhism; and that by this means the general falsity of these systems has been so plainly shown, that it has become a matter of doubt whether a single educated native of any considerable ability in reality believes in them. They seem to have lost their hold of all the minds capable of appreciating the weight and force of scientific evidence.

Let us further remark, that since it seems inevitable that pretended revelations of ancient date should pledge themselves to a false science, the presumption must be strong that an ancient revelation of great multiplicity of detail, which has not so pledged itself, is not a false, but a true revelation. Nay, if we find in it the line drawn between what man can know of himself and what he cannot know, and determine that this line was traced in a remote and primitive age, we have positive evidence in the circumstance, good so far as it extends, of its Divine origin. Now, it will be ultimately found that this line was drawn with exquisite precision in the Hebrew Scriptures,—not merely the most ancient works that profess to be revelations, but absolutely the most ancient of all writings. Unfortunately, however, what God seems to have done for his Revelation, influential theologians of both the Romish and Orthodox Churches have labored hard to undo; and, from their mistaking, in not a few remarkable passages, the scope and object of the vouchsafed message, they have at various times striven to pledge it to a science as false as even that of Buddhist, Teuton, or Hindu. And so, not only has the argument been weakened and obscured which might be founded on the rectitude of the line drawn of old between what ought and what ought not to be the subject of revelation, but even a positive argument has been furnished to the infidel,—ever ready to identify the glosses of the theologian with the enunciations of revelation itself,—similar to that which the Christian missionary directs against the false religions of India. It may be well briefly to inquire how this unlucky mistake has originated.

It is of first importance often to the navigator that he should have a good chronometer, seeing that his ability of determining his exact position on wide seas, and, in consequence, of determining also the exact place and bearing of the rocks and reefs which he must avoid, and of the lands and harbors on which he must direct his course, must very much depend upon the rectitude of his instrument. But it may be of very little importance to him to know how chronometers are made. And so a friend may reveal to him where the best chronometers are to be purchased, with the name of the maker, without at the same time revealing to him the principle on which they are constructed. Let us suppose, however, that from some peculiarity in the mode of the revelation, the navigator has come to believe that it includes both items,—an enunciation regarding the place where and the maker from whom the best chronometers are to be had, and a further enunciation regarding the true mechanism of chronometers. Let us suppose further, that while the good faith and intelligence of his friend are unquestionable, the supposed revelation regarding the construction of chronometers, which he thinks he owes to him, is altogether erroneous and absurd. The chronometer mainly differs from the ordinary watch in being formed of a mixture of metals, which preserve so nice a chemical balance, that those changes of temperature which quicken or retard the movements of common time-pieces fail to affect it. Now, let us suppose that the friend and adviser of the sailor had said to him,—using a common metonymy,—there are no chronometers anywhere constructed that so completely neutralize the temperature as the ones I recommend to you; and that the sailor had at once leaped to the conclusion, that the remark was authority enough for holding that it is the principle of chronometers, not to be composed of such counteractive combinations of metals as that the expansion of one shall be checked by the contraction of another, but to keep up an equal temperature within through a heat-engendering quality in the amalgamated metals. Such a mistake might be readily enough originated in this way; and yet it would be a very serious mistake indeed; seeing that it would substitute an active for a passive principle,—a principle of equalizing the temperature by acting upon it, for a principle of inert impassibility to the temperature. And of course not only would the sailor himself be in error in taking such a view, but he might seriously compromise the intelligence or integrity of his friend in the judgment of all who held, on his testimony, that it was with his friend, and not from his own misconception of his friend's meaning, that the view had originated. And how, let us ask, ere dismissing our lengthened illustration, is an error such as the supposed one here to be tested, and its erroneousness exposed? There can be but one reply to such a query. It might be wholly in vain to fall back upon the ipsissima verba of the revelation made by the sailor's friend. Though in reality but an enunciation regarding the authorship of certain chronometers, it might possibly enough appear, from its metonymic character, to be also a revelation regarding the construction of chronometers. The sailor's error respecting the construction of chronometers is to be tested and exposed, not by any references to what his friend had said, but by the art of the chronometer maker. The demonstrable principles of the art, as practised by the makers of chronometers, must be the test of all supposed revelations regarding the principles and mechanism of chronometer making.



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

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



(Sectional View.)]

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

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