yielded to the more barbarous,-yielded so entirely, that all that survived of vast populations and a comparatively high civilization have been broken temples and great burial mounds locked up in the solitudes. of deep forests; and further, that whole peoples, exhausted by their vices, have sunk into such a state of depression and decline, that, unable any longer to supply the inevitable waste of nature, they have dropt into extinction. And such may have been the condition of the human race during that period of portentous evil and violence which preceded the Deluge. We know that the good came at length to be restricted to a single family; and even the evil, instead of being numbered, as now, by hundreds of millions, may have been comprised in a few thousands, or at most a few hundred thousands, that were becoming fewer every year, from the indulgence of fierce and evil passions, in a time of outrage and violence. The Creator of the race may have dealt with it on this occasion of judgment, as a florist does with some decaying plant, which he cuts down to the ground in order to secure a fresh shoot from the root. At all events, the proof of an antediluvian population at once enormously great and very largely spread must rest with those who hold with Dr. Kitto, that its numbers and extent were such as to militate against the probability of a deluge merely partial; and any such proof we may, with the good old Bishop of Worcester, well "despair of ever seeing" produced. Even admitting, however, for the argument's sake, that the inhabitants of the Old World may have been as numerous as those of China are now,-a number estimated by the recent authorities at more than three hundred and fifty millions,-and the admission is certainly greatly larger than there is argument enough on the other

side to extort, a comparatively partial deluge would have been sufficient to secure their destruction. In short, it may be fairly concluded, that if there be a show of reason against the theory of a flood merely local, it has not yet been exhibited. Even Dr Kitto, with all his ingenuity and learning, has failed to array against it arguments of any real weight or cogency; and in my next address I may be perhaps able to show you that the objections which, on the other hand, bear against the antagonist hypothesis, are at once solid and numerous. I may be mistaken in my estimate; but for some years past I have regarded them as altogether insurmountable.

Þ

LECTURE EIGHTH

THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.

PART II.

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

next in his article on shells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up the question as charged with one of the evidences of that Revelation which it was the great design of his life to subvert. And with an unfairness too characteristic of his sparkling but unsolid writings, we find him arguing, that all fossil-shells were either those of fresh-water lakes and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or of land-snails developed in unusual abundance during wet ones; or that they were shells which had been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land to their homes; or that they were shells that had gone astray from cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not shells at all, but mere shell-like forms, produced by some occult process of nature in the bowels of the earth. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the Noachian Deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in his attempts to neutralise that Paleontologic evidence on which geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a re-action against the special school of infidelity which he had founded, that at length bore it down. He wrote in the middle of the Paris basin, with its multitude of fossil-shells and bones; and, when penning his article for the Encyclopædia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the shell-charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before him; but the Deluge had to be put down, whatever the nature or bearing of the facts; and so he could find in either no evidence of a time when the sea had covered the land. He found instead, only "somè mussels, because there were ponds in the neighbourhood." As for "the spiral petrifactions termed cornu

ammonis," of which the Jurassic Alps are full, they were not nautili, he said; they could be nothing else than reptiles; seeing that reptiles take almost always the form of a spiral when not in motion; and it was surely more likely, that when petrified they should still retain the spiral disposition, than that "the Indian Ocean should have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." Were there not, however, real shells of the Syrian type in France and Italy? Perhaps so. But ought "we not to recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of pilgrims who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought back shells? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming shells of the less superficial deposits, "are we sure," he inquired, "that the soil of the earth cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens contains its apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner, produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake or river petrifactions? -one never sees among them "true marine substances"!! "If there were any, why have we never seen bones of sea-dogs, sharks, and whales?"!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief apparently that he had to deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in behalf of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail him, he could vanquish with a joke.

There was, however, a young German, who had not at the time quite made up his mind either for the French school or against it, who was no uninterested reader of Voltaire's disquisitions on fossil-shells.