THE NO A CHI AN FLOOD. 59 



reckon the years of their uninterrupted histories by tens 

 of thousands *. 



Finally, we may ask, where are the traces of so tre- 

 mendous and unparalleled a convulsion as one that could 

 wrap the whole world in water, and hold all its dsedal 

 beauty for many months in that drowned condition, till 

 a tempest still more furious and unparalleled drave 

 heaven and earth, the clouds and ocean, once more 

 asunder? We know how the little trilobite in the 

 Devonian seas behaved in its hour of peril millions of 

 years back ; we know what food men ate long ages 

 before the Flood, what weapons they used, what houses 

 they built, what animals they tamed ; but what became 

 of man and beast and bird and forest in the supposed 

 universal Deluge, no one knows. The signs and natural 

 monuments of the catastrophe, which should have been 

 visible or discoverable on every side, can nowhere be 

 ascertained, things that the waters should have swept 

 away or torn down they have left undisturbed, shell- 

 mounds and glacier moraines and boulderstones on the 

 mountain-side; while the great museum of the dead 

 which they should have formed, one would think, over 

 all the earth, to constitute one striking and indisputable 

 geological date, as well as a world-wide monument of 

 religion, is nowhere to be found. 



What became of flower and herb, of creatures that 

 live between the zones of high and low water, of mollusk 

 and coral and fish that require an appropriate depth and 

 a fitting temperature in their liquid homes, it will be 



1 See Mill's 'History of British India,' book ii. eh. i, and notes. 



