122 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



informed, we read with interest the wonderful reve- 

 lations of the bone-caves described by Buckland, 

 and felt that the antediluvian age had become a 

 scientific reality. But later still all this seemed to 

 pass away like a dream. Under the guidance of 

 Lyell we learned that even the caves and gravels must 

 be of greater age than the historical Deluge, and 

 that the remains of men and animals contained in 

 them must have belonged to far-off aeons, antedating 

 perhaps even the Biblical creation of man, while the 

 historical Deluge, if it ever occurred, must have been 

 an affair so small and local that it had left no traces 

 on the rocks of the earth. At the same time Biblical 

 critics were busy with the narrative itself, showing 

 that it could be decomposed into different documents, 

 that it bore traces of a very recent origin, that it was 

 unhistorical, and to be relegated to the same category 

 with the fairy-tales of our infancy. Again, however, 

 the kaleidoscope turns, and the later researches of 

 geology into the physical and human history of the 

 more recent deposits of the earth's crust, the dis- 

 coveries of ancient Assyrian or Chaldean records of 

 the Deluge, and the comparison of these with the 

 ancient history of other nations, rehabilitate the old 

 story ; and as we study the new facts respecting the 

 so-called palaeolithic and neolithic men, the clay 

 tablets recovered from the libraries of Nineveh by 

 George Smith, the calculations of Prestwich and 

 others respecting the recency of the glacial period, 

 and the historical gatherings of Lenormant, we find 



