264 HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE vn 



the moderately elevated ridges which immediately 

 bound the valley, still more those of the Kurdish 

 and Armenian mountains, were ever covered by 

 water, for even forty days, that water must have 

 extended over the whole earth. If the earth was 

 thus covered, anywhere between 4000 and 5000 

 years ago, or, at any other time, since the higher 

 terrestrial animals came into existence, they must 

 have been destroyed from the whole face of it, as 

 the Pentateuchal account declares they were three 

 several times (Genesis vii. 21, 22, 23), in language 

 which cannot be made more emphatic, or more 

 solemn, than it is ; and the present population 

 must consist of the descendants of emigrants from 

 the ark. And, if that is the case, then, as has often 

 been pointed out, the sloths of the Brazilian 

 forests, the kangaroos of Australia, the great 

 tortoises of the Galapagos islands, must have 

 respectively hobbled, hopped, and crawled over 

 many thousand miles of land and sea from 

 " Ararat " to their present habitations. Thus, the 

 unquestionable facts of the geographical distribu- 

 tion of recent land animals, alone, form an 

 insuperable obstacle to the acceptance of the 

 assertion that the kinds of animals composing the 

 present terrestrial fauna have been, at any time, 

 universally destroyed in the way desciibed in the 

 Pentateuch. 



It is upon this and other unimpeachable 

 grounds, that, as I ventured to say some time ago, 



