784 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



good scientific reasoning, as I think there is, which seems to prove 

 that no deluge can have been at once complete, universal, and 

 simultaneous, over the whole globe, then there is no more reason 

 to believe it than there is to believe in the literal interpretation of 

 the passages involving the rotation of the sun round the earth, or 

 the still more striking passages which we have seen so summarily 

 dealt with by St. John. 



Leaving, therefore, Prof. Huxley to his jubilations over the 

 general abandonment of a deluge at once complete, universal, and 

 simultaneous, let us see how he proceeds to deal with the alterna- 

 tive of a deluge which may have been enormously wider than the 

 Mesopotamian Valley, and yet may have been partial only as 

 regards the whole area of the globe. 



The device of the professor is to assume that belief in any such 

 deluge must of necessity involve the notion that while the exist- 

 ing levels of the land were fixed or unmoved, the waters were 

 heaped up over some portion of it, without any containing banks 

 or walls to keep or hold them in their new position. Over this 

 ridiculous idea he runs riot and enjoys quite a happy time of it. 

 He shows triumphantly how it contradicts the fundamental laws 

 of hydrostatics, how impossible it is to conceive any agency by 

 which such a heaping up of loose waters could have been effected, 

 and how tremendous must have been the outrush when any (in- 

 conceivable) restraints were removed. Now I am not concerned ' 

 to inquire whether this conception as to the cause of a partial 

 deluge has or has not been ever formulated or distinctly pictured 

 by any human being. Considering the absolute and wide-spread 

 ignorance of all the physical sciences which prevailed in the 

 world for centuries, it is quite possible that something like this 

 may have been one of the popular ideas concerning the Deluge. 

 It is perfectly natural that it should have been so. That in this 

 world of ours the solid earth is the stable, while water is pre-emi- 

 nently the unstable element, is the universal prepossession of 

 mankind. It is not overcome even in countries where the land is 

 often trembling under earthquakes or subject to the ravages of 

 volcanic action. Over by far the largest part of the habitable 

 globe, where men have not even these suggestive experiences to 

 consider, the preconception is insuperable that the land is compar- 

 atively steady and that the sea is the most liable to change. That 

 this preconception should have governed the reasonings of pre- 

 scientific ages and of ignorant men of the present day is not aston- 

 ishing ; but it is most astonishing indeed to see it patronized by 

 Prof. Huxley. The very first lesson of all geological science is to 

 teach us and to make us familiar with the idea that in all relative 

 changes between the areas of sea and land the element of con- 

 stancy is in the liquid water and the element of mutability is in 



