THE NOACHIAN FLOOD. 45 



highly improbable miracles, would have been utterly 

 useless. 



Suppose, however, that they were spread over the 

 earth again by the slow process of natural distribution. 

 Certain perplexities, indeed, may have arisen when they 

 first issued from the ark, when the cobra and the rattle- 

 snake, the hungry wolf and the relentless tiger were let 

 loose upon the impoverished world and its defenceless 

 inhabitants. For at that conjuncture to have destroyed 

 even one cruel and venomous beast might have blotted 

 out a whole species. It is surely a little remarkable 

 that ravenous beasts and birds of prey should have been 

 limited, even while in the ark, to feeding upon animals 

 in a ceremonial or ecclesiastical sense clean ; but if, after 

 they had left the ark, and had once more to provide for 

 themselves, the wily panther and the treacherous hyena 

 must be imagined debating before every meal whether 

 their victim belonged to the sevens of the clean or the 

 couples of the unclean animals, shall we not turn in pity 

 and vexation from any view that involves and admits 

 so monstrous a supposition ? 



But we will concede that every creature bore a 

 charmed life, that it might not perish by famine or 

 violence till it had propagated its kind. We should 

 then expect to observe that species had distributed 

 themselves over the globe in lines either tortuous or 

 direct, single or branching, broad or narrow, but all 

 diverging from a common centre. Yet nothing of the 

 kind is found. On the contrary, the species of the new 

 world differ from those of the old, the species of one 



