576 Mineralogy and Geology of Nova Scotia. 



up and watered the ground : " vegetables alone were given to 

 man for food. "Fourteen cubits of water " were sufficient 

 to cover all the hills. "It rained for forty days and forty 

 nights." " The fountains of the great deep were broken up." 

 After the deluge, the rainbow is mentioned as a new thing ; a 

 proof that it had never rained before. Permission is given to 

 man to eat animal food, without which he could not inhabit 

 the polar regions. Summer and winter, cold and heat, 

 are now first mentioned. The life of man is remarkably 

 shortened. 



The tremendous showers of rain that attend the eruptions 

 of Vesuvius are stated to exceed in violence, and in the im- 

 mense quantity of water which falls, anything observed upon 

 any other occasion ; and the floods which they have produced 

 appear, on some occasions, to have done more damage than all 

 the other accidents attending the eruption. Undoubted vol- 

 canic remains prove that, at some period prior to the date of 

 history, subterranean fires must have prevailed in a greater 

 degree than they have been known to do since. If these 

 eruptions were simultaneous with the deluge, and what is 

 meant by the " breaking up of the fountains of the great 

 deep," they would be sufficient to account for the shock given 

 to the earth, by which the parallelism of its poles with those 

 of the equator was destroyed, and a rotation of seasons neces- 

 sarily introduced. Such a shock must have caused all the 

 water of the ocean to roll over the earth with a force sufficient 

 to have produced our present mountains, by removing the soil 

 that covered them, and, for a time, presented an appearance 

 resembling the allusion of the prophet to this event: — " The 

 windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the 

 earth do shake. The earth is utterly broken down. The 

 earth is clean dissolved. The earth is moved exceedingly. 

 The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be 

 removed like a cottage." 



I have seen a piece of shallow plough-land resting on a 

 sloping rock, which had the earth partly washed off in a heavy 

 shower. The most elevated parts of the rock were naked, with 

 a few large stones upon them, often resting on pebbles ; the 

 hollows of the rock filled with loose stones, which covered a 

 portion of the gravel ; here and there, where a whirling eddy 

 had been formed by the position of the stones, small hillocks 

 of the earth formed ; the earth which had been carried off 

 disposed in layers, varying in fineness and in the proportion 

 of small stones which they contained. Such is the general 

 appearance of our mountainous districts upon a larger scale. 

 The rounded form of the stratified gravel everywhere indi- 



