THE NOACHIAN FLOOD. 149 



that no universal deluge has drowned our globe, either 

 within the last ten thousand years, or even within a 

 period indefinitely longer.' Now, since certainly no 

 Darwinian accepts the old views about the Deluge, this 

 sentence could scarcely have been written for the benefit 

 of Darwinians; and it would have been a very unso- 

 phisticated piece of rhetoric to say to a popular audience 

 ' Darwinism is true, so you see the old views about 

 the Deluge are false,' seeing that the popular audience 

 might have disposed of the argument by the simple plan 

 of interchanging the two adjectives. But the lecture 

 opens with an acknowledgment that a recent universal 

 deluge would be an argument sufficient to upset the 

 Darwinian Theory, prior to showing that so important 

 an objection to the theory is itself on numerous in- 

 dependent grounds untenable. Some arguments are 

 equally in harmony with Darwinism, and inconsistent 

 with the universality of the Noachian Flood. One of 

 these is to be found in the existing diversities of the 

 human race : but your correspondent appears to suppose 

 that the element of time has nothing to do with the 

 theory of development, when he says that ' to represent 

 the divergence of races as impossible in any given pe- 

 riod, however short, is strange ground for a Darwinian 

 to take up/ He might as well require an engineer to 

 believe that an engine had been driven at six hundred 

 miles an hour, because the engineer himself believed it 

 to have been driven at the rate of fifty or sixty. 

 He only half states the argument against a common 

 Noachian descent founded on the difference between the 



