DELUGE. 20ft 



porary derangement of level of more or less extent. Hence, without 

 doubt, the extraordinary inundations, which, at each catastrophe, 

 have ravaged the surface of existing lands, and produced, as in our 

 day, various denudations, or superficial alluvions, of more or less 

 extent. 



Now, since, without counting all that escaped tntf investigations 

 of science, we clearly see, in Europe, a series of successive move- 

 ments of the soil, which have modified the whole continent, and 

 many even a whole hemisphere, there is nothing absurd in admit- 

 ting that what took place at so many different tiir.es, from the most 

 ancient to the most modern epochs of formation, may have happened 

 once, somewhere after the appearance of man on the earth. Con- 

 sequently there is nothing contrary to reason in the belief of a 

 great irruption of water over the lands, a general inundation, a 

 deluge, in fact, which we find described not only in the Bible, but 

 deeply impressed in the traditions of all people, and at an almost 

 uniform date. Thus, in recognising in the recital of Moses, the 

 extraordinary circumstances which bear witness to the supernatural 

 intervention of the divine will, we see, on one hand, the material 

 possibility of the fact transmitted to us, and, on the other, we find 

 even the secret of the means brought into play ; that is, the up- 

 heavals, the subsidences, the consequent oscillations of the water, 

 which from that time became efficient causes of the great chastise- 

 ment then inflicted on the human race. If, because the known 

 results it has produced are feeble, we cannot too carefully seek the 

 cause of this great phenomenon, in the last of the upheavals to this 

 time classed, which dislocated the deposits in which traces of human 

 industry have already been found : perhaps it may be discovered in 

 that which caused the rise of the Andes in America, and the volcanic 

 chain of central Asia, which, with a colossal development, also 

 present striking characters of relative novelty. 



As to the future of our planet, everything leads to a belief that 

 the state of tranquillity we now enjoy is but temporary, like all the 

 intervals of crises during which the different sedimentary deposits 

 were formed. In fact, in the series of perturbations which, through 

 all time, have formed part of the mechanism of nature, we perceive 

 no law authorising us to conceive a termination to the succes- 

 sion of these phenomena : to accidents of little importance succeed, 

 indistinctly, either crises of the same order, or frightful catastrophes ; 

 long periods of tranquillity suddenly succeed terrible convulsions. 

 To the small upheaval of mount Viso, for example, succeeded the 

 great catastrophe'of the Pyrenees ; to this the small accidents of the 

 system of Corsica, which were followed by the great event of the 

 Alps. The long period of the jura'ssic formation was disturbed 

 by the upheaval of Cote-d'Or, as the deposit of the vosgean sand- 

 stone was almost immediately arrested by the system of the Rmne. 

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