MESOPOTAMIA 303 



of postulating. If catastrophic geology had at times 

 pushed Nature to almost indecent extremes of haste, 

 uniformitarian geology, on the other hand, had erred 

 in the opposite direction, and pictured Nature when she 

 was "young and wantoned in her prime," as moving 

 with the tame sedateness of advanced middle age. It 

 became necessary, therefore, as Dr. Haughton expresses 

 it, " to hurry up the phenomena." 



With its uniformitarianism thus moderated, geology 

 has again become cosmologic, and neglecting no study 

 that can throw light on any question connected with our 

 planet, has regained its position as the science of the 

 earth : it is henceforth known as evolutional geology. 



The change has not taken place without occasional 

 relapses into catastrophism. Some indications of this 

 can, I fancy, be perceived in the writings of that eminently 

 great geologist, Suess, who, amongst other suggestions 

 savouring of heresy, has lately recalled attention to the 

 "deluge," and endeavoured to show that, though certainly 

 local, and indeed confined to the Mesopotamian valley, 

 it was on a grander scale than we had been accustomed 

 to suppose, or, in plain language, a genuine historic 

 catastrophe. 



A clue to the locality of the deluge is furnished by 

 Genesis itself, which informs us that Abraham, the 

 founder of the Hebrew race, left his ancestral city, " Ur 

 of the Chaldees " (Fig. 93), at a time long subsequent to the 

 flood ; it is, therefore, rather in the land of the Chaldees 

 than in Palestine that we should be led to seek the scene 

 of this momentous tragedy. 



This land is no other than the famous and once 

 beautiful valley of Mesopotamia, through which the great 

 Euphrates and arrow-swift Tigris flow to empty them- 

 selves into the Persian gulf Almost lost sight of for 

 awhile, interest in it was reawakened some seventy years 



