222 LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE vi 



teenth day of the seventh month, the ark, which 

 had previously floated on its surface, grounds upon 

 the " mountains of Ararat " l (Gen. viii. 34). 

 Then, as Diestel has acutely pointed out 

 (" Sintflut," p. 13), we are to imagine the further 

 subsidence of the flood to take place so gradually 

 that it was not until nearly two months and a-half 

 after this time (that is to say, on the first day of 

 the tenth month) that the "tops of the moun- 

 tains " became visible. Hence it follows that, if 

 the ark drew even as much as twenty feet of 

 water, the level of the inundation fell very slowly 

 at a rate of only a few inches a day until the 

 top of the mountain on which it rested became 

 visible. This is an amount of movement which, 

 if it took place in the sea, would be overlooked 

 by ordinary people on the shore. But the 

 Mesopotamian plain slopes gently, from an eleva- 

 tion of 500 or 600 feet at its northern end, to the 

 sea, at its southern end, with hardly so much as 

 a notable ridge to break its uniform flatness, for 

 300 to 400 miles. These being the conditions of 

 the case, the following inquiry naturally presents 

 itself : not, be it observed, as a recondite problem, 

 generated by modern speculation, but as a plain 

 suggestion flowing out of that very ordinary and 

 archaic piece of knowledge that water cannot be 



1 It is very doubtful if this means the region of the Armenian 

 Ararat. More probably it designates some part either of the 

 Kurdish range or of its south-eastern continuation. 



