592 THE UNIVERSE. 



The birth of lofty chains of mountains has occasioned 

 great disturbances among the ancient oceans. Some, as we 

 have seen, gave rise to those disastrous inundations men- 

 tioned in the cosmogony of every race possessed of written 

 annals. According to Messrs. d'Omalius d'Halloy, Beudant, 

 and Elie de Beaumont, the most imposing catastrophe of 

 historic times, our Mosaic deluge, was probably only the 

 effect of the mightiest upheaval of the globe, that of the 

 Andes ; and the uplifting of America above the ocean, 

 which was the result of this, gave rise to the immeasur- 

 able flood which broke tumultuously against the old conti- 

 nent. 



In his work on cataclysms M. Frederick Klee has laid 

 down some very remarkable views on this subject. Accord- 

 ing to him the axis of the globe has suffered displacements, 

 and it was the last of these that occasioned that terrible 

 event the deluge. 



Nothing checks M. Klee in his daring conceptions. He 

 even thinks that some of the contemporaries of this great 

 telluric revolution may have passed safely through it, and 

 that to those who thus survived we owe the legends which 

 erudition has discovered in some ancient writings. Accord- 

 ing to this geologist, it is to the witnesses of this irresisti- 

 ble convulsion that we must ascribe the mythical traditions 

 in which it is said that during the catastrophe of the del- 

 uge the sun, moon, and stars changed their places in the 

 heavens. 



If, indeed, the axis of the globe had been displaced, man, 

 regarding the earth then as being immovable and in the 

 centre of the universe, would naturally think it was the 



