The Testimony of the Rocks Part 13

There are cases in which not more than from two to three centuries have been found sufficient thoroughly to alter the original physiognomy of a race. "On the plantation of Ulster in 1611, and afterwards, on the success of the British against the rebels in 1641 and 1689," says a shrewd writer of the present day, himself an Irishman, "great mult.i.tudes of the native Irish were driven from Armagh and the south of Down, into the mountainous tract extending from the Barony of Fleurs eastward to the sea; on the other side of the kingdom the same race were exposed to the worst effects of hunger and ignorance, the two great brutalizers of the human race. The descendants of these exiles are now distinguished physically by great degradation. They are remarkable for open, projecting mouths, with prominent teeth and exposed gums; and their advancing cheek bones and depressed noses bear barbarism on their very front. In Sligo and northern Mayo the consequences of the two centuries of degradation and hards.h.i.+p exhibit themselves in the whole physical condition of the people, affecting not only the features, but the frame.

Five feet two inches on an average,--pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively featured, their clothing a wisp of rags,--these spectres of a people that were once well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness and Irish want."

Such is man as man himself has made him,--not man as he came from the hand of the Creator. In many instances the degradation has been voluntary; in others it has been forced upon families and races by the iron hand of oppression; in almost all,--whether self-chosen by the parents or imposed upon them,--the children and the children's children have, as a matter of inevitable necessity, been born to it. For, whatever we may think of the Scriptural doctrine on this special head, it is a fact broad and palpable in the economy of nature, that parents _do_ occupy a federal position; and that the lapsed progenitors, when cut off from civilization and all external interference of a missionary character, become the founders of a lapsed race. The iniquities of the parents are visited upon the children. And in all such instances it is _man_ left to the freedom of his own will that is the deteriorator of man. The doctrine of the Fall, in its purely theologic aspect, is a doctrine which must be apprehended by faith; but it is at least something to find that the a.n.a.logies of science, instead of running counter to it, run in exactly the same line. It is one of the inevitable consequences of that nature of man which the Creator "bound fast in fate," while he left free his will, that the free will of the parent should become the destiny of the child.

But the subject is one in which we can see our way as but "through a gla.s.s darkly." Nay, it is possible that the master problem which it involves no created intelligence can thoroughly unlock. It has been well said, that the "poet's heart" is informed by a "terrible sagacity;" and I am at times disposed to regard Milton's conception of the perplexity of the fallen spirits, when reasoning on "fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," and finding "no end in wandering mazes lost,"

much rather as a sober truth caught from the invisible world, than as merely an ingenious fancy. The late Robert Montgomery has rather unhappily chosen Satan as one of the themes of his muse; and in his long poem, designated in its second t.i.tle "Intellect without G.o.d," he has set that personage a-reasoning in a style which, I fear, more completely demonstrates the absence of G.o.d than the presence of intellect. It has, however, sometimes occurred to me, that a poet of the larger calibre, who to the Divine faculty and vision added such a knowledge of geologic science as that which Virgil possessed of the Natural History of his time, or as that which Milton possessed of the general learning of _his_, might find, in a somewhat similar subject, the materials of a poem which "posterity would not willingly let die." There is one of the satirists justly severe on a cla.s.s of critics

"Who, drily plain, without invention's aid, Write dull receipts how poems may be made."

But at some risk of rendering myself obnoxious to his censure, I shall attempt indicating at least the general scope and character of what the schoolmen might term a _possible_ poem; which, if vivified by the genius of some of the higher masters of the lyre, broad of faculty, and at once great poets and great men, might prove one precious boon more to the world, suited, conformably to the special demands of these latter times, to

"a.s.sert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of G.o.d to man."

There has been war among the intelligences of G.o.d's spiritual creation.

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

With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,--as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,--must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,--scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know!

"Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth G.o.d, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation pa.s.sed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,--how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,--how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,--how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth,--man, the moral agent,--man, the ultimate work and end of creation,--man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened,--how must solicitude have grown,--when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and the proud waves of ocean had been stayed,--when, after species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his experience,--stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with G.o.d's spiritual universe,--that all _animals_ should die,--that all _moral agents_ should live. How, in this new creature,--this prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before had been united,--the nature of the animals that _die_ with the standing and responsibility of the moral agents that _live_,--how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute _immortality_, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with and shade into the _mortality_ which, let us extend the term of previous vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final annihilation and the ceasing to be?

At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by G.o.d's own finger, and in G.o.d's own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made.

And yet, left to the freedom of his own will, there is a weakness in the flesh that betrays his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the ground that the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, who, like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and wakes, and can feel thirst and hunger, and the weariness of toil, and the sweets of rest, and who come under the general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated of old to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood of old; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and fell. There awakes a grim hope in the sullen lord of the first revolt. Ages beyond tale or reckoning has this temple of creation been in building. Long have its mute prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in beast, told of coming man, its final object and end. And now there needeth but one blow, and the whole edifice is destroyed, G.o.d's purposes marred and frustrated, and this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct races, under the eternal law of death. Armed with the experience in evil of unsummed ages, the Tempter plies his work: nor is it to low or ign.o.ble appet.i.tes that he appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for knowledge; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles of the Old Serpent prevail; man falls prostrate before him; creation trembles; and then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of G.o.d. And lo!

in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins.

Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white tents of the desert; the temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount Zion; prophet after prophet declares his message. At length, in the fulness of time, the Messiah comes; and, in satisfying the law, and in fulfilling all righteousness, and in bringing life and immortality to light, abundantly shows forth that the terminal dynasty of all creation had been of old foreordained, ere the foundations of the world, to possess for its eternal lord and monarch, not primeval man, created in the image of G.o.d, but G.o.d, made manifest in the flesh, in the form of primeval man. But how breaks on the baffled Tempter the sublime revelation? Wearily did he toil,--darkly did he devise, and take, in his great misery, deep counsel against the Almighty; and yet all the while, while striving and resisting as an enemy, has he been wielded as a tool; when, glaring aloof in his proud rebellion, the grasp of the Omnipotent has been upon him, and the Eternal Purposes have encompa.s.sed him, and he has been working out, all unwittingly, the foreordained decree, "For our G.o.d maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him, and the remainder thereof doth he restrain."

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

Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth had entertained very opposite views,--the poet Coleridge.

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

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

The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the Scriptures could not possibly have been given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science these truths were never yet found, there would be little danger even of difference among them, and none of collision. Nay, there is, I doubt not, a time coming in which the Butlers and Chalmerses of the future will be content to recognize the geologic field as that of their richest and most pregnant a.n.a.logies. It is with the history of the pre-Adamic ages that geology sets itself to deal; and by carefully conning the ancient characters graven in the rocks, and by deciphering the strange inscriptions which they compose, it greatly extends the record of G.o.d's doings upon the earth. And what more natural to expect, or rational to hold, than that the Unchangeable One should have wrought in all time after one general type and pattern, or than that we may seek, in the hope of finding, meet correspondences and striking a.n.a.logies between his revealed workings during the human period, and his previous workings of old during the geologic periods,--correspondences and a.n.a.logies suited to establish the ident.i.ty of the worker, and, of course, from that ident.i.ty to demonstrate the authenticity of the revelation? Permit me to bring out, in conclusion, what I have often thought on this subject, but have not been able so tersely to express, in a brief quotation from one of the most instructive works of the present age, the "Method of the Divine Government," by the Rev. Dr. M'Cosh:--"Science has a foundation,"

says this solid thinker and accomplished writer, "and so has religion.

Let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of G.o.d. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other let those who have faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to G.o.d, and the other, the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent in twain, and in which, on a blood-sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living G.o.d."

LECTURE SEVENTH.

THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.

PART I.

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

There is, however, one special tradition which seems to be more deeply impressed and more widely spread than any of the others. The destruction of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world's history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impressed the minds of the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that their remote descendants of the present day have not even yet forgotten it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries, and among the most barbarous tribes. It was the laudable ambition of Humboldt,--first entertained at a very early period of life,--to penetrate into distant regions, unknown to the natives of Europe at the time, that he might acquaint himself, in fields of research altogether fresh and new, with men and with nature in their most primitive conditions. In carrying out his design, he journeyed far into the woody wilderness that surrounds the Orinoco, and found himself among tribes of wild Indians whose very names were unknown to the civilized world. And yet among even these forgotten races of the human family he found the tradition of the deluge still fresh and distinct; not confined to single tribes, but general among the scattered nations of that great region, and intertwined with curious additions, suggestive of the inventions of cla.s.sic mythology in the Old World. "The belief in a great deluge," we find him saying, "is not confined to one nation singly,--the Tamanacs: it makes part of a system of historical tradition, of which we find scattered notions among the Maypures of the great cataracts; among the Indians of the Rio Erevato, which runs into the Caura; and among almost all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco. When the Tamanacs are asked how the human race survived this great deluge,--'_the age of water_' of the Mexicans,--they say, a man and woman saved themselves on a high mountain called Tamanacu, situated on the banks of the Asiveru, and, _casting behind them over their heads_ the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in these fruits produce men and women, who re-peopled the earth. Thus,"

adds the philosophic traveller, "we find in all simplicity, among nations now in a savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished with all the charms of imagination." The resemblance is certainly very striking. "Quit the temple," said the Oracle to Deucalion and Pyrrha, when they had consulted it, after the great deluge, regarding the mode in which the earth was to be re-peopled,--"vail your heads, unloose your girdles, and throw behind your backs the bones of your grandmother."

Rightly interpreting what seemed darkest and most obscure in the reply, they took "stones of the earth," and, casting them behind them, the stones flung by Deucalion became men, and those by Pyrrha became women, and thus the disfurnished world was peopled anew. The navigator always regards himself as sure of his position when he has _two_ landmarks to determine it by, or when in the open ocean he can ascertain, not only his lat.i.tude, but his longitude also. And this curious American tradition seems to have its two such marks,--its two bisecting lines of determination,--to identify it with the cla.s.sic tradition of the Old World that refers evidently to the same great event.

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

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

Sir William Jones, perhaps the most learned and accomplished man of his age (such at least was the estimate of Johnson), and the first who fairly opened up the great storehouse of eastern antiquities, describes the tradition of the deluge as prevalent also in the vast Chinese empire, with its three hundred millions of people. He states that it was there believed that, just ere the appearance of Fohi in the mountains, a mighty flood, which first "flowed abundantly, and then subsided, covered for a time the whole earth, and separated the higher from the lower age of mankind." The Hindu tradition, as related by Sir William, though disfigured by strange additions, is still more explicit. An evil demon having purloined the sacred books from Brahma, the whole race of men became corrupt except the seven Nis.h.i.+s, and in especial the holy Satyavrata, the prince of a maritime region, who, when one day bathing in a river, was visited by the G.o.d Vishnu in the shape of a fish, and thus addressed by him:--"In seven days all creatures who have offended me shall be destroyed by a deluge; but thou shalt be secured in a capacious vessel, miraculously formed. Take, therefore, all kinds of medicinal herbs, and esculent grain for food, and, together with the seven holy men, your respective wives, and pairs of all animals, enter the ark without fear: then shalt thou know G.o.d face to face, and all thy questions shall be answered." The G.o.d then disappeared; and after seven days, during which Satyavrata had conformed in all respects to the instructions given him, the ocean began to overflow the coasts, and the earth to be flooded by constant rains, when a large vessel was seen coming floating sh.o.r.e-wards on the rising waters; into which the Prince and the seven virtuous Nis.h.i.+s entered, with their wives, all laden with plants and grain, and accompanied by the animals. During the deluge Vishnu preserved the ark by again taking the form of a fish, and tying it fast to himself; and when the waters had subsided, he communicated the contents of the sacred books to the holy Satyavrata, after first slaying the demon who had stolen them. It is added, however, that the good man having, on one occasion long after, by "the act of destiny,"

drunk mead, he became senseless, and lay asleep naked, and that Charma, one of three sons who had been born to him, finding him in that sad state, called on his two brothers to witness the shame of their father, and said to them, What has now befallen? In what state is this our sire?

But by the two brothers,--more dutiful than Charma,--he was hidden with clothes, and recalled to his senses; and, having recovered his intellect, and perfectly knowing what had pa.s.sed, he cursed Charma, saying, "Thou shalt be a servant of servants." It would be difficult certainly to produce a more curious legend, or one more strikingly ill.u.s.trative of the mixture of truth and fable which must ever be looked for in that tradition which some are content to accept even in religion as a trustworthy guide. In ever varying tradition, as in those difficult problems in physical science which have to be wrought out from a mult.i.tude of differing observations, it is, if I may so express myself, the mean result of the whole that must be accepted as approximately the true one. And the mean result of those dim and distorted recollections of the various tribes of men which refer to the Flood is a result which bears simply to this effect,--that in some early age of the world a great deluge took place, in which well nigh the whole human family was destroyed.

The ancient traditions which have come down to us embalmed in cla.s.sic literature form but a small portion of what seems once to have existed in the wide region now overspread by Christianity and Mohammedanism. A second deluge, more fatal to at least the productions of the human mind than the first had been, overspread the earth during what are known as the Middle Ages; and so signal was the wreck which it occasioned, that of seven heathen writers[24] whose testimony regarding the Flood Josephus cites as corroborative of his own, not one has descended in his writings to these later times. We learn, however, from the Jewish historian, that one of their number, Berosus, was a Chaldean; that two of the others, Hieronymus and Manetho, were Egyptians; and that a third, Nicolaus, whose history he quotes, was a citizen of Damascus. "There is," said this latter writer, in his perished history, "a great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris, upon which it is reported that many who fled at the time of the deluge were saved; and that one who was carried in an ark came on sh.o.r.e on the top of it; and that the remains of the timber were a great while preserved. This might be the man,"

added this forgotten writer, "about whom Moses, the legislator of the Jews, wrote." The works of the Chaldean, Berosus, have long since been lost, all save a few extracts preserved by the Patristic writers. One of these, however, which embodies the Chaldean tradition of the Flood, is very remarkable. Like the Scandinavian legend, it represents the antediluvians as giants, all of whom, save one, became exceedingly impious and depraved. "But there was one among the giants," says Berosus, "that reverenced the G.o.ds, and was more wise and prudent than all the rest. His name was Noa; he dwelt in Syria, with his three sons, Sem, j.a.pet, Chem, and their wives, the great Tidea, Pandora, Noela, and Noegla. This man, fearing the destruction which, he foresaw from the stars, would come to pa.s.s, began, in the seventy-eighth year before the inundation, to build a s.h.i.+p covered like an ark. Seventy-eight years from the time he began to build this s.h.i.+p, the ocean of a sudden broke out, and all the inland seas and the rivers and fountains bursting from beneath (attended by the most violent rains from heaven for many days), overflowed all the mountains; so that the whole human race was buried in the waters, except Noa and his family, who were saved by means of the s.h.i.+p, which, being lifted up by the waters, rested at last upon the top of the Gendyae or Mountain, on which, it is reported, there now remaineth some part, and that men take away the bitumen from it, and make use of it by way of charm or expiation, to avoid evil." A more general a.s.syrian tradition, somewhat different in its details, also survives.[25] The G.o.d Chronus, it was said, appeared in a vision to Xisuthrus, the tenth king of Babylon; and, warning him that on a certain day there would be a great flood upon the earth, by which mankind would be destroyed, he enjoined him to build a vessel, and to bring into it his friends and relatives, with everything necessary to sustain life, and all the various animals, birds, and quadrupeds. In obedience to the command, the king built a vessel about three quarters of a mile in length and half a mile in breadth, which he loaded with stores and the different kinds of animals; and into which, on the day of the flood, he himself entered, accompanied by his wife and children, and all his friends. The flood broke out. After, however, accomplis.h.i.+ng its work of destruction, it abated; and the king sent out birds from the vessel, which, at first finding no food or place of rest, returned to him; but which, when, after the lapse of some days, he sent them forth again, came back to him with their feet tinged with mud. On a third trial they returned no more; upon which, judging that the surface of the earth was laid dry, he made an opening in the vessel, and, looking forth, found it stranded on a mountain of the land of Armenia.

There seems to exist no such definite outline of the Egyptian tradition referred to by Josephus as that preserved of the Chaldean one. Plato, In his "Timaeus," makes the Egyptian priest whom he introduces as discoursing with Solon, to attribute that clear recollection of a remote antiquity which survived in Egypt, to its comparative freedom from those great floods which had at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed the memory of remote events by the destruction of the people and their records; and Bacon had evidently this pa.s.sage in view when he poetically remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that "the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are two,--deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account of the time past." Even in Egypt, however, the recollection of the deluge seems to have survived, though it lay entangled amid what seem to be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah of Egypt," says Professor Hitchc.o.c.k, in his singularly ingenious essay (Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark, which, being closed, he was forced to sea; and it was a curious fact, that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,--the very day, most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The cla.s.sical tradition of Greece, as if the events whence it took its rise had been viewed through a multiplying gla.s.s, appears to have been increased from one to many. Plutarch enumerates no fewer than five great floods; and Plato makes his Egyptian priest describe the Greek deluges as oft repeated and numerous. There was the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Ogyges, and several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the mythologic ages,--the last of them to which any determining circ.u.mstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,--it appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than that many wide-spread and destructive floods should have taken place in the obscure, fabulous ages of Grecian story, while not one such flood has happened during its two thousand five hundred years of authentic history. Nor is it difficult to conceive how such repet.i.tions of the original tradition _should_ have taken place. The traditions of the same event preserved by tribes living in even the same tract of country come in course of time considerably to differ from each other in their adjuncts and circ.u.mstances; those, for instance, of the various tribes of the Orinoco do so; and should these tribes come to be fused ultimately into one nation, nothing seems more probable than that their varying editions, instead of being also fused together, should remain distinct, as the recollections of separate and independent catastrophes.

And thus the several deluges of Grecian mythology may in reality testify, not to the occurrence of several floods, but to the existence merely of several independent tribes, among whom the one great tradition has been so altered and modified ere they came to possess a common literature, that when at length they became skilful enough to place it on record, it appeared to them not as one, but as many. The admirable reflection of Humboldt suggested by the South American traditions seems, incidentally at least, to bear out this view. "Those ancient traditions of the human race," he says, "which we find dispersed over the whole surface of the globe, like the relics of a vast s.h.i.+pwreck, are highly interesting in the philosophical study of our own species. How many different tongues belonging to branches that appear totally distinct transmit to us the same facts! The traditions concerning races that have been destroyed, and the renewal of nature, scarcely vary in reality, though every nation gives them a local coloring. In the great continents, as in the smallest islands of the Pacific Ocean, it is always on the loftiest and nearest mountain that the remains of the human race have been saved; and this event appears the more recent in proportion as the nations are uncultivated, and as the knowledge they have of their own existence has no very remote date." And it seems at least not improbable, that the several traditions of apparently special deluges,--deluges each with its own set of circ.u.mstances, and from which the progenitors of one nation were saved on a hill-top, those of another on a raft, and those of yet another in an ark or canoe, and which in one instance destroyed only giants, and had in another the loss which they occasioned repaired by date-stones, and in yet another by stones of the earth,--should come to be regarded among a people composed of various tribes, and but little accustomed to sift the evidence on which they founded, rather as all diverse narratives of diverse events, than as in reality but varied accounts of one and the same tremendous catastrophe.

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

"Impetuous rain descends; Nor from his patrimonial heaven alone Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down; But from his brother of the seas he craves To help him with auxiliary waves.

Then with his mace the monarch struck the ground; With inward trembling earth received the wound, And rising streams a ready pa.s.sage found.

Now seas and earth were in confusion lost,-- A world of waters, and without a coast.

A mountain of tremendous height there stands Betwixt the Athenian and Boeotian lands: Parna.s.sus is its name, whose forky rise Mounts through the clouds, and mates the lofty skies.

High on the summit of this dubious cliff, Deucalion, wafting, moored his little skiff: He, with his wife, were only left behind Of perished man; they two were human kind: The most upright of mortal men was he,-- The most serene and holy woman she."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 109.

APAMaeAN MEDAL.]

Such are some of the traditions of that great catastrophe which overtook the human family in its infancy, and made so deep an impression on the memories of the few awe-struck survivors, that the race never forgot it.

Ere the dispersal of the family it would have of course existed as but one unique recollection,--a single reflection on the face of an unbroken mirror. But the mirror has since been shattered into a thousand pieces; and we now find the object, originally but one, pictured in each broken fragment, with various degrees of distinctness, according to the various degrees of injury received by the reflecting medium. _Picture_, too, scarce less certainly than language spoken and written, testifies to the wide extent of the tradition. Its symbols are found stamped on coins of old cla.s.sical Greece; they have been traced amid the ancient hieroglyphics of Egypt, recognized in the sculptured caves of Hindustan, and detected even in the far west, among the picture writings of Mexico.

The several glyphic representatives of the tradition bear, like its various written or oral editions, a considerable resemblance to each other. Even in the rude paintings of the old Mexican, the same leading idea may be traced as in the cla.s.sic sculpture of the Greek. On what is known to antiquaries as the Apamaean medal, struck during the reign of Philip the elder, we find the familiar name of _Noe_ inscribed on a floating chest or ark, within which a man and woman are seen seated, and to which a bird on the wing is represented as bearing a branch.[26] And in an ancient Mexican painting, figured by Humboldt, "the man and woman who survived the age of water" are shown similarly inclosed in a leaf-tufted box, or hollow trunk of a tree; while a gigantic female,--Matalcueje, the G.o.ddess of water,--is seen pouring down her floods around them, and upon an overwhelmed human figure, representative apparently of the victims of the catastrophe. All is cla.s.sical in the forms of the one representation, and uncouth in those of the other. They bear the same sort of _artistic_ relation to each other that the rude Tamanac tradition bears, in a _literary_ point of view, to the well constructed story and elegant verse of Ovid; but they are charged apparently with the same meaning, and shadow forth the same event.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 110.

OLD MEXICAN PICTURE.

(_Humboldt._)]

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

It is known to all students of the sacred writings, that there is a numerous cla.s.s of pa.s.sages in both the Old and New Testaments in which, by a sort of metonymy common in the East, a considerable part is spoken of as the whole, though in reality often greatly less than a moiety of the whole. Of this cla.s.s are the pa.s.sages in which it is said, that on the day of Pentecost there were Jews a.s.sembled at Jerusalem "out of _every nation under heaven_;" "that the gospel was preached to _every creature under heaven_;" that the Queen of Sheba came to hear the wisdom of Solomon from the "_uttermost parts of the earth_;" that G.o.d put the dread and fear of the children of Israel upon the nations that were "_under the whole heaven_;" and that "_all countries_ came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn." And of course the universally admitted existence of such a cla.s.s of pa.s.sages, in which words are _not_ to be accepted in their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain great modifications, renders the task of determining and distinguis.h.i.+ng such pa.s.sages from others in which the meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate, but also laudable; and justifies us in inquiring whether those pa.s.sages descriptive of the Flood or its effects, in which it is said that the "waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth," so that "_all_ the high hills that were under _the whole heavens_ were covered," or that "_all_ flesh died that moved upon the earth," belong to their number or no.

There are some instances in which the Scriptures themselves reveal the character and limit the meaning of the metonymic pa.s.sages. They do so with respect to the pa.s.sage already quoted regarding the stranger Jews a.s.sembled in Jerusalem at the Pentecostal feast,--"out of every nation under heaven." For further on we read that these Jews had come from but the various countries extending around Judea, as far as Italy on the one hand, and the Persian Gulf on the other;--an area large, indeed, but scarce equal to a one fiftieth part of the earth's surface. But there is no such explanation given to limit or restrict most of the other pa.s.sages; the modifying element must be sought for outside the sacred volume,--in ancient history or ancient geography. The reader must, for instance, acquaint himself with the progress of discovery in early ages, or the boundaries of the Roman Empire under the first Caesars, ere he can form a probable conjecture regarding the extent of that "all the earth"

which sought the presence of Solomon, or a correct estimate respecting the limits of that "all the world" which Caesar Augustus could have taxed. And to this last cla.s.s, which fail to explain themselves, the pa.s.sages respecting the Flood evidently belong. Like the pa.s.sages cited, and, with these, almost all the texts of Scripture in which questions of physical science are involved, the limiting, modifying, explaining facts and circ.u.mstances must be sought for in that outside region of secular research, historic and scientific, from which of late years so much valuable biblical ill.u.s.tration has been derived, and with which it is so imperatively the duty of the Church to keep up an acquaintance at least as close and intimate as that maintained with it by her gainsayers and a.s.sailants.

That the Noachian deluge might have been but partial, not universal, was held, let me here remark, by distinguished theologians in our own country, at least as early as the seventeenth century. It was held, for instance, by the learned biblical commentator, old Matthew Poole, whom we find saying, in his Synopsis on Genesis, that "it is not to be supposed that the entire globe of the earth was covered with water;" for "where," he adds, "was the need of overwhelming those regions in which there were no human beings?" It was held also by that distinguished Protestant churchman of the reign of Charles II., Bishop Stillingfleet, whom Princ.i.p.al Cunningham of Edinburgh well describes, in his elaborate edition of the Bishop's work, "The Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome," as a divine of "great talents and prodigious learning." "I cannot see," says the Bishop, in his "Origines Sacra," "any urgent necessity from the Scriptures to a.s.sert that the Flood did spread over all the surface of the earth. That all mankind, those in the ark excepted, were destroyed by it, is most certain, according to the Scriptures. The Flood was universal as to mankind; but from thence follows no necessity at all of a.s.serting the universality of it as to the globe of the earth, unless it be sufficiently proved that the whole earth was peopled before the Flood, which I despair of ever seeing proved." It was not, however, until the comparatively recent times in which the belief entertained by Poole and Stillingfleet was adopted and enforced by writers such as Dr. Pye Smith, and Professor Hitchc.o.c.k of the United States, that there was any show of argument displayed against the theory of a partial deluge which would now be deemed worthy of consideration. And these modern objections may be found ingeniously arrayed by the late Dr. John Kitto, in his "Daily Bible Ill.u.s.trations,"

published only six years ago (in 1850), and by the learned Dr. William Hamilton of Mobile, in his "Friend of Moses," published in 1852. Both these writers, however, virtually agree with their opponents in holding that the strict meaning of the terms employed by Moses in describing the deluge is to be determined on considerations apart from the mere philological ones. After marshalling his objections to the theory of a local flood, Dr. Kitto goes on to say, "We yield our judgment to what appears to us the _force of these arguments_ as to the _meaning_ of Scripture;" and we find Dr. Hamilton prefacing his objections as follows:--"Were the mere universality of some of the terms employed in the Mosaic narrative the _sole_ ground of objection to the hypothesis of a _local_ inundation only in the days of Noah, that hypothesis might perhaps be deemed admissible. But there are," he adds, "other and more serious difficulties attending it." Let us, then, briefly examine these supposed difficulties and objections; and as they have been better and more amply stated by Dr. Kitto than by any other writer with whom I am acquainted,--for Dr. Hamilton takes up rather the arguments in favor of a universal, than the objections against a merely partial flood,--let us take them as they occur in his writings, especially in the excellent work now before me,--his "Daily Bible Ill.u.s.trations." It will scarce be suspected that such an accomplished writer, who did so much for Biblical Ill.u.s.tration, and whose admirable Pictorial Bible formed, with but four works more, what Chalmers used to term with peculiar emphasis his "Biblical Library,"[27] would do injustice to any cause, or any line of argument which he adopted, if it was in reality a good and sound one.

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

When, however, the doctor pa.s.ses to argument based upon natural science, we find what he adduces worthy of our attention, were it but for the inquiries which it suggests. "If the deluge were but local," we find him saying, "what was the need of taking _birds_ into the ark; and among them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove? A deluge which could overspread the region which these birds inhabit could hardly have been less than universal. If the deluge were local, and all the birds of these kinds in that district perished,--though we should think they might have fled to the uninundated regions,--it would have been useless to enc.u.mber the ark with them, seeing that the birds of the same species which survived in the lands not overflowed would speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters subsided." It will be found that the reasoning here is mainly based upon an error in natural science, into which even naturalists of the last century, such as Buffon, not unfrequently fell, and which was almost universal among the earlier voyagers and travellers,--the error of confounding as identical the merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of thus a.s.signing to _species_ wide areas in creation which in reality they do not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or rather _family_; for it consists of more genera than one. It is so extensively present over the northern hemisphere, that Siberia, Norway, Iceland, and North America, have all their grouse,--the latter continent, indeed, from five to eight different kinds; and yet so restricted are some of the species of which they consist, that, were the British islands to be submerged, one of the best known of the family,--the red grouse, or moor-fowl (_Lagopus Scoticus_),--would disappear from creation. This bird, which, rated at its money value, is one of the most important in Europe,--for the barren moors which it frequents in the Highlands of Scotland alone are let every season almost entirely for its sake for hundreds of thousands of pounds,--is exclusively a British bird; and, unless by miracle a new migratory instinct were given to it, a complete submersion of the British islands would secure its destruction. If the submergence amounted to but a few hundred miles in lateral extent, the moor-fowl would to a certainty not seek the distant uninundated land. Nor is it at all to be inferred, that in a merely local but wide spread deluge, birds occupying a more extensive area than that overspread by the Flood would, according to Dr.