THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND OF SCIENCE. 643 



speedily found itself a good way down the Persian Gulf, and not 

 long after in the Indian Ocean, somewhere between Arabia and 

 Hindostan. Even if, eventually, the ark might have gone ashore, 

 with other jetsam and flotsam, on the coasts of Arabia, or of Hin- 

 dostan, or of the Maldives, or of Madagascar, its return to the 

 " mountains of Ararat " would have been a miracle more stupen- 

 dous than all the rest. 



Thus, the last state of the would-be reconcilers of the story of 

 the deluge with fact is worse than the first. All that they have 

 done is to transfer the contradictions to established truth from 

 the region of science proper to that of common information and 

 common sense. For, really, the assertion that the surface of a 

 body of deep water, to which no addition was made, and which 

 there was nothing to stop from running into the sea, sank at the 

 rate of only a few inches or even feet a day, simply outrages the 

 most ordinary and familiar teachings of every man's daily expe- 

 rience. A child may see the folly of it. 



In addition, I may remark that the necessary assumption of 

 the " partial deluge " hypothesis (if it is confined to Mesopotamia) 

 that the Hebrew writer must have meant low hills when he said 

 "high mountains" — is quite untenable. On the eastern side of 

 the Mesopotamian plain, the snowy peaks of the frontier ranges 

 of Persia are visible from Bagdad,* and even the most ignorant 

 herdsmen in the neighborhood of " Ur of the Chaldees," near its 

 western limit, could hardly have been unacquainted with the 

 comparatively elevated plateau of the Syrian Desert which lay 

 close at hand. But, surely, we must suppose the biblical writer 

 to be acquainted with the highlands of Palestine and with the 

 masses of the Sinaitic Peninsula, which soar more than eight 

 thousand feet above the sea, if he knew of no higher elevations ; 

 and, if so, he could not well have meant to refer to mere hillocks 

 when he said that " all the high mountains which were under the 

 whole heaven were covered" (Gen. vii, 19). Even the hill-country 

 of Galilee reaches an elevation of four thousand feet ; and a flood 

 which covered it could by no possibility have been other than uni- 

 versal in its superficial extent. Water really can not be got to 

 stand at, say, four thousand feet above the sea-level over Pales- 

 tine, without covering the rest of the globe to the same height. 

 Even if in the course of Noah's six hundredth year some prodi- 

 gious convulsion had sunk the whole region inclosed within " the 

 horizon of the geographical knowledge * of the Israelites by that 

 much, and another had pushed it up again, just in time to catch 

 the ark upon " the mountains of Ararat," matters are not much 



* So Reclus (Nouvelle Geographie Universelle, ix, 386), but I find the statement doubted 

 by an authority of the first rank. 



