88 REVIEWS. 



conditions of animal life, while a scrupulous regard is paid, throughout, 

 to the statements of the Inspired Record, as well as the character and acts 

 of its Divine author. 



We confess that our author's reasoning on this point appears to us un- 

 exceptionable ; as a specimen we present our readers with the following 

 summary : — 



"The deluge was an event of the existing creation. Had it been universal, 

 it would either have broken up all the diverse centres, and substituted one great 

 general centre instead — that in which the ark rested ; or else, at an enormous ex- 

 pense of miracle, all the animals preserved by natural means by Noah would have 

 had to be returned by supernatural means to the regions whence by means 

 equally supernatural they had been brought. The sloths and armadilloes — little 

 fitted bv nature for long journeys — would have required to be ferried across the 

 Atlantic to the regions in which the remains of the megatherium and glyptodon 

 lie entombed ; the kangaroo and wombat, to the insulated continent that con- 

 tains the bones of the extinct macropus and phascolomys ; and the New 

 Zealand birds, including its heavy flying quails and its wingless wood-hen, to 

 those remote islands of the Pacific in which the skeletons of Palapteryx ingens and 

 Dinornus giganteus lie entombed. Nor will it avail aught to urge, with certain 

 assertors of an universal deluge, that during the cataclysm, sea and land changed 

 their places, and that what is now land had formed the bottom of the antedi- 

 luvian ocean, and vice versa, what is now sea had been the land on which the 

 first human inhabitants of the earth increased and multiplied. No geologist 

 who knows how very various the ages of the several table-lands and mountain- 

 chains in reality are could acquiesce in such an hypothesis ; our own Scottish 

 shores — if to the term of the existing we add that of the ancient coast -line — 

 must have formed the limits of the land from a time vastly more remote than 

 the age of the Deluge. But even supposing, for the argument's sake, the hypo- 

 thesis recognised as admissible, what, in the circumstances of the case, would 

 be gained by the admission ? A continuous tract of land would have stretched 

 — when all the oceans were continents aud all the continents oceans — between 

 the South American and the Asiatic coasts. And it is just possible that, during 

 the hundred and twenty years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths 

 might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, from where the skele- 

 tons of the great megatheria are buried, to where the great vessel stood. But 

 after the flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land had taken place, 

 there would remain for them no longer a roadway ; and so, though their journey 

 outwards might, in all save the impulse which led to it, have been altogether a 

 natural one, their voyage homewards could not be other than miraculous. Nor 

 would the exertion of miracle have had to be restricted to the transport of the 

 remoter travellers. How, we may well ask, had the Flood been universal, could 

 even such islands as Great Britain and Ireland have ever been replenished with 

 many of their original inhabitants ? Even supposing it possible that animals 

 such as the red deer and the native ox might have swam across the Straits of 

 Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits in which the bones and 

 horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed long ages before, the feat 

 would have been surely far beyond the power of such feeble natives of the soil 

 as the mole, the hedge-hog, the shrew, the dormouse, and the field vole. 



Taking this ground, and successfully maintaining it, in such companion- 

 ship as the eminent American writer already mentioned, and the late learned 

 and devout Dr. J. Pye Smith, and others like them, Mr. Miller's views will» 

 we feel, commend themselves to most, if not all, who give them a fair 

 consideration. 



