148 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



any ordinary testimony would be sufficient It may 

 be profitable, however, to revert here to the probable 

 relation of this narrative to the geological facts 

 already adverted to, and also its bearing on the 

 mythical and polytheistic additions which we find 

 in the Deluge stories of heathen nations. 



Regarding the Biblical Deluge as a record of a 

 submergence of a vast region of Eur-Asia and 

 Northern Africa, at least, while no similar cata- 

 strophe has been recorded subsequently, it is un- 

 questionable that submergences equally important 

 have occurred again and again in the geological 

 history of our continents, and have been equally 

 destructive of animal life. It is true that most of 

 these are believed to have been of more slow and 

 gradual character than that recorded in Genesis, but 

 in the case of many of them this is a very uncertain 

 inference from the analogy of modern changes ; and 

 it is certain that the post-glacial submergence, which 

 closed the era of palaeocosmic man and his com- 

 panion animals, must have been one of the most 

 transient on record. On the other hand, we need 

 not limit the entire duration of the Noachic sub- 

 mergence to the single year whose record has been 

 preserved to us. Local subsidence may have been 

 in progress throughout the later antediluvian age, 

 and the experience of the narrator in Genesis may 

 have related only to its culmination in the central 

 district of human residence. Finally, if man was 

 really a witness of this last great continental sub- 



