1 24 Analysis of Scientific Books, 



reason why the exuvioe of animals are occasionally met with, 

 whose species no longer exist on the earth. Physical science 

 unconnected with moral, cannot solve the difficulty, nor can it 

 be expounded but by reference to the power and will of God ; 

 who, for reasons known only to the counsels of his divine 

 wisdom, was pleased, when he communicated to Noah the 

 species he designed to preserve " to keep seed alive upon the 

 earth," to except some from that preservation. 



Further on, our author mentions the singular fact, that the 

 Arabian camel, (that with one hunch,) is not found wild in 

 any part of the earth, existing only as the property of man, 

 and deduces an ingenious inference from it, in opposition to 

 an assumption of the mineral geology " that the revolution 

 which destroyed the animal races of which we discover the 

 fossil exuviae, was different from that which established the 

 progenitors of the human race in Asia." The circumstance 

 can only be rationally accounted for by considering those 

 animals as the descendants of the pair preserved in the ark, 

 as all the present human race are the descendants of Noah, 

 and, that from their great utility, none have ever since been 

 suffered to escape from the dominion of man. 



The domesticity of the entire race of this peculiar species of camel, is 

 therefore a living and perpetual evidence both of the revolution in which 

 the whole animal creation perished, excepting a reserved few, and of that 

 also in which the human race was first established on the continent of 

 Asia. 



Because animal and vegetable relics are found buried in the midst 

 of soils, which are too confidently pronounced the most ancient secondary 

 strata, and because land animals are found under heaps of marine pro- 

 ductions, Cuvier at once assumes that the various positions of these relics 

 constitute evidences of as many diflferent revolutions. 



They are, however, easily explained from the data of the 

 Mosaical geology. After the imbedding of the innumerable 

 land animals in the sands or slimy bottom of the primitive sea, 

 violent and particular agitations within its basin may have 

 dislodged and put in motion, especially in the latter stages of 

 its draining, enormous masses of its loose soil, and have driven 

 them, loaded with marine substances, upon the beds in which 

 the terrestial animals had previously sunk ; and repetitions 

 of such events, which may and must have occurred during that 

 disorderly crisis, would produce various alternations of such 

 depositions, " diversified by different circumstances, and re- 

 ducible to no rule of regularity and order." As to the fresh- 

 water shells alleged to be found in some of these accumula- 

 tions, a pertinent doubt is suggested by Mr. Greenough, whe- 

 ther the distinction between them and marine shells be so cer- 

 tainly ascertained as to allow of a conclusive argument founded 

 upon that distinction. 



Our author argues very forcibly on the impossibility that 

 unconfined waters, diffused originally over a compact, extended, 

 and nearly horizontal surface, should have formed valleys, or 



