590 Geological Collections. 



Diluvial Gravel, and the traces of a General Deluge Bearing upon this 



difficult question, there is, I think, one great negative conclusion now incon- 

 testably established, — that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered 

 almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and 

 transitory period. It was indeed a most unwarranted conclusion, when we 

 assumed the contemporaneity of all the superficial gravel on the earth. We 

 saw the clearest traces of diluvial action, and we had, in our sacred histories, 

 the record of a general deluge. On this double testimony it was, that we 

 gave a unity to a vast succession of phenomena, not one of which we 

 perfectly comprehended, and, under the name diluvium, classed them all 

 together. 



To seek the light of physical truth by reasoning of this kind, is, in the 

 language of Bacon, to seek the living among the dead, and will ever end in 

 erroneous induction. Our errors were, however, natural, and of the same 

 kind which led many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the 

 secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. Having been my-- 

 self a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now 

 regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for 

 opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before 

 I quit this chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.* 



We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian 

 theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic 

 flood. For of man, and the works of his hands, we have not yet found a 

 single trace among the remnants of a former world entombed in these ancient 

 deposits. In classing together distant unknown formations under one name ; 

 in giving them a simultaneous origin, and in determining their date, not by 

 the organic remains we had discovered, but by those we expected hypo- 

 thetically hereafter to discover, in them ; we have given one more example 

 of the passion with which the mind fastens upon general conclusions, and 

 of the readiness with which it leaves the consideration of unconnected 

 truths. 



Are, then, the facts of our science opposed to the sacred records ? And 

 do we deny the reality of a historic deluge ? I utterly reject such an 

 inference. Moral and physical truth may partake of a common essent^e, but 

 as far as we are concerned, their foundations are independent, and have not 

 one common element. And, in the narrations of a great fatal catastrophe, 

 handed down to us, not in our sacred books only, but in the traditions of all 

 nations, there is not a word to justify us in looking to any mere physical 

 monuments as the intelligible records of that event : such monuments, at 

 least, have not yet been found, and it is not perhaps intended that they ever 

 should be found. If, however, we should hereafter discover the skeletons 

 of ancient tribes, and the works of ancient art buried in the superficial 

 detritus of any large region of the earth, then, and not till then, we may 

 speculate about their stature, and their manners, and their numbers, as we 

 now speculate among the disinterred ruins of an ancient city. 



We might, I think, rest content with such a general answer as this. But 

 we may advance one step farther : History is a continued record of passions 

 and events, uncoimected with the enduring laws of mere material agents. 

 The progress of physical induction, on the contrary, leads us on to discoveries, 

 of which the mere light of history would not indicate a single trace. But 

 the facts recorded in history may sometimes, without confounding the nature 

 of moral and physical truth, be brought into a general accordance with the 

 known phenomena of nature ; and such general accordance, I affirm, there is 



* Addendum. — And I now, with the same publicity, and with inconceivably more satis- 

 faction, pay a just homage to the Kev. Dr Fleming, by stating, that he has long and 

 couaistently laboured to burst the bonds of our old superstition, and that he will, alter 

 this my avowal, be always entitled to the tribute of honourable mention in connection 

 with the overthroAV of the diluvian hvpothcsis. — Ed. 



