THE NOACHIAN FLOOD. 53 



skeleton and the whole fibre of the mind, they would 

 still be too great to admit a common derivation of the 

 whole human family from the patriarch Noah. 



What Geology teaches to demonstration is, that all 

 parts of the dry land have been not once only but many 

 times under the waters of the ocean ; but it teaches like- 

 wise to demonstration that at least for many and many 

 an age, almost beyond our powers of conceiving duration 

 of time, there has been no total submergence of the land. 

 That interchange of lake and sea with isle and continent 

 which is now going on under our eyes, has been going 

 on for ages innumerable. By this and kindred means 

 human beings, like all kinds of animals and all kinds 

 of plants, have at intervals experienced severance into 

 groups and isolation. Thus has mankind been broken 

 up into distinct families, at first with no line of demar- 

 cation except the geographical, but gradually in suc- 

 cessive generations becoming more and more unlike in 

 manners, morals, language, features, intelligence, and 

 civilization. But since the era of the Noachian Deluge 

 neither has there been time for Nature, with her slow 

 though certain processes, to effect so great a recon- 

 struction of barriers as to break up the human family, 

 if till then continuous and united ; nor, if there had been 

 time for the geographical severance, would there have 

 been time for the constitutional changes. 



Among the ancients some believed that the sun, moon, 

 and stars were in reality about the size which they 

 appear to the unassisted eyesight; others supposed the 

 vault of the sky to be a revolving dome of solid crystal 



