PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE WAR-PATH. 783 



Genesis definitely excludes. The writer ascribes the subsequent 

 repeopling of the earth, both as regards the lower animals and 

 men, not to any re-creative work, but to ordinary generation. 

 The divine employment of natural means is the dominant idea of 

 the whole narrative. But seeing that the dimensions of the ark 

 represent a vessel considerably smaller than the Great Eastern, 

 it is clear that without what are called miracles on the most stu- 

 pendous scale which the writer does not seem at all to contem- 

 plate the whole creatures of all the continents of the globe could 

 not have been represented in it, even if they could have been 

 brought together and congregated in one spot in western Asia. 

 The writer or writers of the narrative in Genesis, or those still 

 older recipients of tradition in whose hands that narrative grew 

 into its present form and through whom it was transmitted, had 

 presumably no more knowledge of the very existence of the New 

 World, or indeed of the extent of the Old World, and of the quan- 

 tity of animal life which swarms upon both, than they had of the 

 nature of the sun or of the orbit of the earth. What they con- 

 ceived or thought upon this subject has no moral or religious sig- 

 nificance. Whether the American mastodon and megatherium, 

 and the European mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, and all 

 the other huge Pleistocene mammalia, were saved at all, even 

 in single couples whether all the lesser mammalia which have 

 survived could or could not be saved from drowning by the 

 refuge afforded in a single vessel these are questions which 

 do not seem to have been even thought of. Accordingly, the 

 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews does not even take the 

 smallest notice of such questions, or, at all events, brushing 

 them aside, fixes on the central conception of the whole narrative, 

 the effect of the Deluge upon man, and the personal relations 

 between one faithful patriarch and the Almighty Disposer of 

 all events. He tells us that this one man "by faith, being 

 warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, pre- 

 pared an ark to the saving of his house." * Here we have the 

 whole essence and purport of the narrative in the Old Testament 

 condensed, and reproduced by a Christian disciple who, whatever 

 his name, is certainly, humanly speaking, one of the most power- 

 ful among the writers of the New. It matters nothing to this 

 view of it, whether the Deluge was or was not conceived to be 

 literally universal, complete, and simultaneous. It matters noth- 

 ing what may or may not have happened at the same time to the 

 kangaroos of Australia, to the moas of New Zealand, to the giraffes 

 and countless antelopes of central Africa, or to the llama and 

 tapir world of the South American continent. If there is any 



* Hebrews, xi, 7. 



