298 GEOLOGIES AND DELUGES 



ocean, the waters of which were boiling ; saw it peopled 

 with strange and various forms of life, and watched it run 

 its course, rejoicing in the sun, " chearfull, fresh, and 

 full of joyaunce glad," then pictured it overtaken with 

 disasters, shaken with earthquakes, overwhelmed by 

 floods, and agonising in the labours of a new birth. 

 Calm followed after storm, and life rejoiced afresh in a 

 remade world to be again destroyed. Thus, through 

 alternations of peace and strife, the earth moved on its 

 changeful way, to the crowning creation of man, who 

 was himself a living witness of the last great catastrophe 

 of all, the Noachian deluge. Its waters covered the whole 

 earth, to the tops of the highest mountains under heaven, 

 and on their retreat they left behind, as a standing 

 witness to their extension, great sheets of sediment, 

 supposed to be spread out over the entire surface of the 

 globe, and appropriately named the " diluvium." The 

 diluvium may be seen in most parts of the British Isles, 

 except in the south of England ; it consists of clays and 

 sands, containing vast numbers of curiously scratched 

 stones. 



As the powers of geology matured it became increasingly 

 able to dispense with catastrophes. The very diluvium 

 itself was shown to be local in its distribution, and glacial 

 in its origin ; masses of moving ice, like that which buries 

 the greater part of Greenland out of sight, covered a 

 large part of the temperate regions, and this it was that 

 produced the curious scratched stones and the deposits 

 containing them, which are consequently no longer 

 called "diluvial," but "glacial." More important yet, 

 land could be shown to be still actually rising from the 

 sea, and mountains growing into the air, but so slowly 

 that the fact was not established without much dispute, 

 which is hardly yet over. Valleys could be shown to result, 

 not from any bodily fracturing of the land, but from the 



