PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE WAR-PATH. 785 



the solid earth. The sea is bound by the most rigorous laws to 

 keep its general level. The dry land is under no similar bondage 

 to keep either its general or its local elevation. On the contrary, 

 the same great force which keeps water with its peculiar proper- 

 ties in a fixed relation to its supports is the very force which 

 ceaselessly tends to make those supports yielding and unsteady. 

 It is true, indeed, that the ocean leans against the land with an 

 attracted bulge. This bulge is not visible to the eye, nor can it, 

 perhaps, be measured by any mechanical instrument; but the 

 mind of man has recognized it as a necessary consequence of the 

 law of gravitation. All land-masses above the water must at- 

 tract more or less the sea which is beneath them. Independently 

 of this, from ordinary hydrostatic causes, the ocean must always 

 be lipping over along its shores ever ready, as it were, to take 

 instant advantage of the smallest movement of depression. Del- 

 uges, therefore, by submergence are ever on the cards. They are 

 the easiest and most natural operations in the world. Of course, 

 Prof. Huxley knows all this, and, of course, he does not commit 

 himself to any other doctrine ; but he does argue against a partial 

 deluge as if it involved of necessity the vulgar error of the sea 

 being raised up and heaped over any area which may have been 

 submerged. This is not ingenuous. What is the value of a sci- 

 entific argument against any supposed occurrence which rests 

 entirely on a popular delusion as to the physical causes by which 

 that occurrence may have been brought about, while the contro- 

 versialist knows all the time that the very same occurrence might 

 very easily have been brought about by other causes perfectly 

 natural and perfectly easy to conceive ? Yet this is the way in 

 which Prof. Huxley prances on his selected battle-horse of the 

 Deluge. He elaborates picture after picture of the physical con- 

 sequences involved in a partial deluge effected by a heaping up of 

 unsupported waters over a fixed and steady land, and then he 

 stamps upon the nonsense which he has himself adopted in so 

 far at least as it is useful to him, and has intensified where it 

 could be made to be so. 



This perverse dwelling upon an absurd physical conception, 

 as a means of raising prejudice, is all the more gratuitous and 

 irrelevant since, wherever else it came from, it certainly did not 

 come from any description contained in the Hebrew narrative. On 

 the contrary, one of the most salient and even mysterious char- 

 acteristics of that narrative is that it is absolutely inconsistent 

 with the idea of sudden, violent, and torrential action. Prof. 

 Huxley himself, in the midst of his strained denunciation of what 

 must have been involved in any partial deluge, stumbles on the 

 fact that the Hebrew narrative assumes a rate of movement so 

 slow and gradual that " if it took place in the sea, would be over- 



