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UNIVERSALITY OF THE DELUGE.

The depressed noses and advancing cheek bones become personal, for however the Scotch nose may stand, and it assumes many forms, one is hardly permitted to doubt concerning our cheek bones. They advance, perhaps, as witnesses against our civilisation. The quotation furnishes an example of the common error of over-proving a case. The employment of apocryphal evidence to support a general fact is needless. It would even weaken a strong case, if that were possible. We would have been pleased to refer the average of five feet two, bowed legs, and pot bellies to those Connaught Rangers who went down the street of Fuentes d'Honore, " clearing the way" of the best soldiers that Napoleon had ever sent to Spain; or even of those Connaught Rangers whose Crimean deeds are fresher still in the public memory than those of the soldiers of the Peninsular war; but Mayo and Sligo are extensive counties of Connaught.

Mr.

The seventh and the eighth lectures contain the author's arguments against the universality of the deluge. He believed that the deluge was only partial, but extended over all the surface of the earth occupied then by the human race. Miller did not deny that all mankind were destroyed in the deluge, with the exceptions in the ark, but he did not believe that all the other animals were destroyed, or even that any great number of them were drowned in the flood. Eighteen pages, at the commencement of the seventh lecture, are occupied with an epitome of these traditions regarding the flood, which establish the universality of that judgment over mankind, although not necessarily over the world. Those traditions found among all nations, barbarian and civilised, eastern and western, in history, in poetry, and in sculpture-establish the occurrence of the deluge, and the destruction of nearly all the human family in its waters. The solution of the question that all the earth was submerged in order to destroy nearly all mankind, is of extremely little importance in It is not a novel inquiry; for the supposition of a partial flood was held long ago by several commentators. The late Dr. Kitto reviewed the arguments on both sides, and decided in favour of the geographical universality of the flood.

one sense.

Points of resemblance occur in the character of Dr. Kitto and Mr. Miller. The former certainly rose out of a depth in which the latter was never sunk, and under disadvantages that the geologist never knew. They were both distinguished English writers; but while Dr. Kitto attained a high place in Biblical literature, Mr. Miller laboured in the literally dark places of the earth for scienti fic knowledge. His seventh lecture is chiefly a criticism upon Dr. Kitto's article on the deluge. The seventh and the eighth lectures are both examples of the dangers following an ardent devotion to a particular study. Mr. Miller's opinion may be either right or wrong for our present purpose, but it was preferred by him on

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geological grounds. The universality of the deluge accounts for many phenomena on the crust of the globe, that, without it, are consigned to geological explanations. A geologist who is very zealous for his art, therefore, has a prejudice in favour of a partial flood. That alternative leaves him all the strange remains of tropical life found in temperate climes, and of nautical shells on rugged hills a thousand yards above the sea, as materials for his daily researches, and even for imaginative theorising. The late Mr. Boothroyd has the following note, respecting the universality of the deluge, in his new translation of the scriptures. Mr. Boothroyd was not attached unreasonably to old opinions; but boldly followed facts and truth wherever they led; yet, although he must have been intimately acquainted with the possibilities suggested by Poole and Stillingfleet, with the views of Dr. Pye Smith and Professor Hitchcock, he did not even notice them. The following is the reference made to the subject in his notes:

According to Moses the flood was universal; for the highest mountains under the whole heavens were covered, and whatsoever lived was destroyed. By this catastrophe the earth must have been greatly changed; some of the primeval hills and mountains must have been torn asunder, earth and rocks thrown together, so as to form new, and perhaps higher mountains than before; shells and lighter bodies they are found at this day; and others might subside with might be carried to the tops of the highest mountains, where the water into the earth, where they are still discovered. The whole face of the globe, and the most accurate investigation of its strata continue to substantiate the Mosaic account of the deluge. In proof of what is stated, it may be observed, that the moose-deer, a native of America, has been found in Ireland; elephants, natives of Asia and Africa, have been found in England; crocodiles, natives of the Nile, and other African rivers, in the heart of Germany; and shell

fish and the skeletons of whales, in the inland counties of England, the former only known to live in the American

seas, and the latter in the cold regions of the north.

We do not ascribe perfect or undue accuracy to Mr. Boothroyd, but we quote the passage to show how one able and modern scholar regarded the event. He holds that the Mosaic account implied the universality of the deluge. That is the question continued-for it had long ago been raised by Mr. Miller, who argued that Moses did not describe a universal deluge; and, not unlike other authors who have flourished in Edinburgh, has argued upon this point more keenly than upon any one within his own range of knowledge. He ejected Dr. Kitto from the field of Biblical criticism with little more difficulty or doubt than he had experienced with Robert Hall in metaphysical reasoning. He held that some Scriptual texts are not to be taken in their grammatical, or literal, meaning, but are only modes of expression in which a definite stands for an indefinite quantity. These passages, he writes, are well known to every Biblical critic, and he quotes several of them, but not quite correctly, and he does not refer to the passages. The following quotatinn shows the nature of this argumeut. It is in answer to Dr. Kitto ::

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It will scarce be suspected that such an accomplished writer, who did so much for Biblical illustration, and whose admirable "Pictorial Bible," with but four works more formed what Chalmers used to term, with peculiar emphasis, his "Biblical Library," 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, however, be well 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 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 motion, 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 not 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 uo more, their Bible true," have, perhaps, in 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 sciences, they have fallen into extravagant error. And as any question which, bearing not upon the punitory extent aud 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 upon the almost invariable experience of ages, that the deductions from Scripture of the "plain man" 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 a very " 'plain man" who would infer from the universality of a passage so evidently metonymic, that that fear extended to Japan on the one hand, or to the Red Indians of the Rocky Mountains, on the other. The phrase, "under the whole Heavens," seeins but to be co-extensive in meaning with the phrase "upon the face of the whole earth." The "whole earth" is evidently tantamount to the whole terrestial floor,-"the whole heavens" to the whole celestial roof that arches over it; and upon what principle the whole terrestial floor is to be deemed less extensive than the floor under the whole celestial roof, really does not appear. Farther, nothing can be more certain than that both the phrases contrasted by Dr. Kitto, are equally employed in the metonymic form.

The argument is affected by the exact words of the passage quoted, concerning the Israelites, which might be prophetical and unfulfilled. Many Biblical critics have assumed that the Jews must become a great, or, in the words of the late Dr. Chalmers,

a

metropolitan" nation, in order to the fulfilment of many of these prophecies; and not a few persons at the present time whose opinions may be entitled to a little weight, believe that the Bibli cal critics in question are wrong; and that the prophecies will be found fulfilled in the larger branch of the Hebrew family. They, of course, aver that the larger exists under other names. We mention these things merely to show the dif ferences of opinion that may exist, and always will exist, respecting prophetic passages until their clear fulfilment ; and the difficulty is almost essential to prophecy. For, if it were intelligible by the audience to whom it was first communicated, and they recognised its authority, they would at once seek to fulfil it, and expose the prediction to the charge of being vindicated by the zeal of its friends. Many of these prophetic passages are put in the present tense, as matters now accom. plished,-perhaps for the reason mentioned by St. Peter, "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." foundation in the text; for we presume that he Mr. Miller's argument, as now quoted, has no quoted Deutoronomy ii., and 25th verse:-" This day will I begin to put the dread of thee, and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble and be in anguish on account of thee." The assurance in this verse is that a process is begun, which may not be concluded; and that process is confined to certain specified nations, so that we must make certain that the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and the people of Japan, have heard report of the people addressed, before Mr. Miller's argument can be of any value.

The subsequent reasoning, upon the ground that the ark could not have contained all the different classes of beasts and birds, proceeds upon the idea that each diversity of kind was represented there; and this is an unnecessary supposition. Two animals might have represented all the dogs on earth, and two all the horses; yet if all other kinds of animals have diverged to an equal extent from the parent source, the various genera may have been preserved in nearly the one hundred kinds of beasts, and two hundred kinds of fishes, calculated by one author—although no reason exists for supposing that the number was so small. Upon the other hand, nobody can see the end of the calculation, if it is to proceed after the following style:

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 statement is intended to prove that the ark must have contained specimens of each differ

INHABITANTS OF THE ARK.

ent species, or division of a species, both in beasts and birds, on the globe, if the deluge be considered universal. Because these moor fowls, having no particular object in view by removing the bounds of their habitation, do not now cross on the one side to Iceland, or on the other to Norway, we are told that in a deluge they would rather perish than fly a few hundred miles. Doves have similar or stranger diversities, and the circumstance is made the ground of a beautifully written catalogue of the doves; but it does not establish the slightest reason for supposing that a male and female of each of these families would have been required in the ark, even if the flood had been universal. The author would not have been so anxious for the accommodation of so many doves and grouse as he was, if he had not previously resolved that the flood must be considered local. Sir Walter Raleigh and Buffon had reckoned the number of separate beasts at two hundred, or thereby ; but now it is brought up to sixteen hundred, and with a little ingenuity might be divided down or up to two or three thousand, in addition to more than six thousand birds and six hundred reptiles. The manner of affecting this increase is remarkable, and shows that with the material it may go on indefinitely. At page 329 the Author wrote:

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 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 goats at fourteen species; in 1856 he estimates them at twenty. In 1848 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 antelopes, unequivocally clean antelopes, and multiply the whole by seven, we shall have, as a result, a sum total of one thousand one hundred and sixtytwo individuals-a number more than four times greater than that for which Noah made provision in the Ark, and considerably more than twice greater than that provided for by the students of Buffon.

It is useless to say more on this subject, than that Mr. Waterhouse's twenty species of goats in 1856, make no more for the argument than his fourteen species of 1848. The divergence of species is the whole question, denied by Mr. Miller, asserted by others. The economy of the ark was miraculous, yet the lecturer treats it as a very common sort of matter. The ark was merely a large ship, and the creatures within its walls were engaged upon a long voyage. The carnivorous animals were not, he thinks, changed for the time in their habits, "the form of their teeth, the character of their stomach, and the shortness of their bowels;" yet we know from daily experience, that many carnivorous are also gramnivorous animals. The cat in its way, or the dog in his department, relish both sorts of food; yet if either

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should be confined from infancy to the carnivorous, an effort would be necessary to get porridge recognised by the animal as a fitting dinner. It does not follow, however, from any scriptural statement, that food convenient for all the voyagers in the ark was not provided. We are told that food was provided, and it would be difficult to prove that it was not of the right sort. For anything that we know to the contrary the ark may have been supplied with all that a modern commissarygeneral would have considered necessary.

The reader is next told of the five hundred and

fifty thousand species of insects that had to be accommodated, many with no wings, many with a life of only a few hours, and many that live upon vegetables which have only a limited geographical existence; and even "supposing that specimens of their eggs were procured," a miracle would be required to restrain their usual progress from that state to one of more active life. Some parties might allege that the eggs of insects lay safely in the mud and survived the deluge, but that class are met by the assertion that a miracle was required for this purpose. The eggs of the hardier insects might survive the treatment, but a majority of the class could only be preserved by a

miracle. The moral is thus stated:-"And be it remembered, that the expedient of having recourse to a 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 asupposititious miracle is introduced." This statement in an avowedly Infidel work would be consistent. The reader might or might not regret the conclusion of the writer, but he would feel no surprise at the remark. The subject is the most stupendous miracle intruded, if we may use the word, on the course of nature since the creation. The only record and all the traditions on the subject treat it as a miracle. When the congregation of the different species of animals, as explained by the statement "went in unto Noah," he and his sons did not, we presume, select the cubs of wild animals and carry them in ; although that might have been done. Another course having been adopted-it was a miraculous course. It was not the natural instinct of the beasts that brought them to the rooms provided for them, but a miracle. Food had been stored there, "all food that is eaten" by beasts and men, if beasts were to be preserved; and there is not the slightest reason for supposing that the common food of different animals was not found in the ark. "Every sort of food-food for thee and for them," is Boothroyd's translation. "The Lord shut him in,"-was that a miracle, or a common process in the ordinary course of nature? In dealing with the grandest miracle of the world, it is strange to find a Christian writer resting his argument against any apparent difficulty upon the plea that we must not have recourse to a suppositious miracle. Certainly, we must not suppose

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miracles; but if we admit the flood, partial or universal, was it not a miracle? By no means, according to Mr. Miller. It was an event that had no claim whatever to be considered miraculous. If a similar event should occur in the present June, "though geologists would have to describe it as, beyond comparison, the most remark. able 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." And to place his object beyond doubt, he proceeded in the next sentence to ask "And why have recourse, in speculating on the real event of four thousand years ago, to a suppositious miracle, if an event of apparently the same kind would not be regarded as miraculous now ?" Mr. Miller not only held the nonmiraculous theory himself, but he imputed it to another who made no such assertion, quoting thus:

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?

This poet does not deny the miracle. Water was a means. The miracle rested on the employment of means out of the ordinary course of nature -the reversion, or the suspension for a time of natural laws. The lecturer, indeed, acknowledges immediately the occurrence of one miracle in the case. The revelation to Noah of the coming flood was, he admits "evidently miraculous." We cannot see how it was more evidently miraculous than any other event in the history-the gathering together, for example, of such wild beasts into the ark as really sought that asylum. Why should we set up "a suppositious miracle ?" Might not Noah have been a most successful student of natural laws, and have foreseen the great oscillation of the earth's surface by scientific knowledge? The long lives of these patriarchs may have enabled them to make greater scientific progress than their descendants have hitherto supposed. When a scientific explanation will serve our purpose, to a suppositious miracle it is wrong to resort. It would have been better to shut all wild animals and beasts of prey out of the ark. No necessity exists for their preservation on that vessel; although Noah and his sons wished to preserve part of their domestic stock wherewith to recommence the world. The reptiles make a difficulty in that explanation, but we cannot account for oriental tastes. As for beasts of prey, seeing that they would be preserved in Africa, and by far the greater part of Asia and Europe, they would find their way to the ex-merged fields of Noah and his family in sufficient time, without the miraculous preservation of these species in the ark. Indeed, the preservation of Noah and his sons from the beasts that may have poured over the parts of the world newly-risen from their watery grave, claims to

be miraculous. However, he and his sons and their wives were in better plight than Adam and Eve, when they were ejected from the Garden of Eden into the outer world, swarming with ca tremendous animal life, that had been engaged in mutual killing on its surface from time immemorial, The Adamite family were not equal to the Noabic in numbers, and they had not, so far as we know, the cleared space around them that belonged to the latter. The war of beasts, according to the geologists, had proceeded very long before the Adamite period upon the earth, and it was quite a mistake ever to suppose that "death entered by sin" upon the new world. The words were only applicable to mankind. Eden itself was not invaded by these terrible beasts of dark den and deep forests! Are we then to have another "suppositious miracle," employed for a season to keep them out? The beasts that were drawn up before Adam to receive their names were not vicious, we presume; therefore, we infer that a creation of cows, horses, and sheep, occurred along with man, but the beasts of prey existed before his time. other supposition is of any value, because many animals exist that never could exist if they wanted men's protection. Sheep would long ago, and long before the deluge, have been an extinct race, if they were not very necessary to mankind, who defend them for the return. This reasoning on suppositious miracles would soon lead us all into the mythic region of Strauss, where this author was strongly tempted to follow, and desperately struggled against the temptation, originating in the pride of reason and science. To that struggle, in a great measure, the distressingly gloomy close may be partly attributed.

No

The natural and non-miraculous flood suggested by Hugh Miller, by the subsidence of the flooded land, meets Dr. Kitto's objection, that the highest mountains could not have been covered over their summits by twenty-two feet or thereby in one country, without overflowing other regions. He supposed that the inhabited earth subsided, and the waters rose into the chasm. Some persons have supposed that the old land became sea, and the former beds of the sea were elevated into land. That idea is now, we believe, resigned as useless. Mr. Miller, therefore, supposed that the land which subsided was, after an adequate interval of time, upheaved. He even endeavours to identify parts of the earth, then inhabited, with some regions of Persian, Russian, and Turkish territory round the Caspian. That region could not have contained many of the eleven thousand millions of men that some calculators suppose to have been dwellers on the earth before the deluge. Others carried up the number much farther, but Mr. Miller prefers a few millions, as is natural, with a small and unproductive country in their hands. He accounts for the paucity of numbers upon the theory that the ante-diluvians were a bloody and deceitful race, whose numbers were reduced by horrible murders and wars. We know that they

THE DELUGE.

were a vicious race, and that such races do not increase rapidly in number; while, if we believe that the ages of the persons named were not over the average duration of lives-and that belief may be inferred from the Scripture account-the population must have increased more rapidly by natural causes, than could be expected from the experience of the new world.

To illustrate his theory, Mr. Miller drew one of those imaginative sketches in which he excelled, of an ark on Arthur's seat, a watcher in that ark, and Scotland going down gradually into the floods, until only the crest of the highest mountains remained, and he adds truly, that to the horrorstricken inmate of the ark the appearance would be that of the water rising, and not of the land sinking.

We suggest, on that explanation, the incongruity of forty days of steady rain, and terrible rain, upon the sinking land. The agency of the rain was entirely unnecessary for this mode of drowning a part of the world. The fall of rain would be the more remarkable if that country then possessed its present characteristic of rainless; and although limited for space, we quote the passage in which Mr. Miller described what he supposed to have been the flooded region:

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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 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 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 a trench like slip 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 particular region is known as the "Low Steppe of the Caucasus," and forms no inconsiderable portion of the great recognised 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 present period. It is quite possible, however, that,--as on parts of the western shores of our own country, where recent 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

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sea, which we know united the Sea of Aral with the Caspian, and rolled over many a wild 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 even during the historic period, at least one of the neighbouring 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," 1epresents the Sea of Azoff as equal in extent to the Euxine.

We are not certain that the measurements of the relative height of those seas, are more correct than that commonly believed a short time since, regarding the difference between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and now found to be erroneous. Their accuracy would, however, not advance the theory by an inch, although one of the author's "plain men," and a critic, too, in noticing the passage, held that the position of the region gives circumstantial evidence that the theory is correct; being led astray by the glitter of the trench-like strip of country filled with the rushing waters of the Baltic; inserted in the passage, not for the purposes of argument, with which it had nothing to do, but for effect. The Steppe of Astracan may be thirty feet below the level of the Baltic, without exercising the slightest influence in the supposed case, where the top of Ararat, full fourteen thousand feet above the level of the Steppe, must have been carried down at least ten feet below that level, or twenty feet below the Baltic level.

We repeat that the forty days' rain was supererogatory to a subsidence of the earth's level, and fatal to the whole argument, resting as it does upon the assumption of no miracle having occurred, but an oscillation on a grand scale, to which the rain would form a miraculous accompaniment in that region, so that what was necessary was done without a miracle, and that which was non-essential to the object was miraculous!

Without considering the calculations made regarding the population of the earth before the deluge, we can have no doubt in repudiating the few millions mentioned in this work, as only convenient for the author's theory. Even some of these few millions-not better but weaker than others would have fled with their families and goods, from a violence which they could not resist, by the Euphrates or the Tigris to the even then sunny south. The hill country of Syria was as fair to view then as now. The plains of Palestine were wildernesses of flowers. The fastnesses of Idumea and Moab were encased in grand and startling scenery. The balms and spices of Araby the Biest were shedding their profusion of riches over the atmosphere. Beyond a desert strip of sand the Nile rolled on its idle waters through its vale of wealth. To the left, through the Afghan Mountains, was the fertile peninsula of Hindostan, a jungle of flowery shrubs nearly equal to Europe

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