326 BIOLOGY AND ITS MAKERS 



to the reasoners who gave free play to their fancies the facts 

 of observation afforded little difficulty. Some declared that 

 the entire surface of the earth had been reduced to the con- 

 dition of a pasty mass, and that the animals drowned by the 

 Deluge had been deposited within this pasty mass which, 

 on the receding of the waters, hardened into rocks. 



The belief that fossil deposits were due to the Deluge 

 sensibly declined, however, near the close of the eighteenth 

 century, but was still warmly debated in the early part of the 

 nineteenth century. Fossil bones of large tropical animals 

 having been discovered about 1821, embedded in the stalag- 

 mite-covered floor of a cavern in Yorkshire, England, some 

 of the ingenious supporters of the flood- theory maintained 

 that caves were produced by gases proceeding from the bodies 

 of decaying animals of large size ; that they were like large 

 bubbles in the crust of the earth, and, furthermore, that bones 

 found in caverns were either those from the decayed carcasses 

 or others that had been deposited during the occurrence of 

 the Flood. 



Even the utterances of Cuvier, in his theory of catastro- 

 phism to which we shall presently return, gave countenance 

 to the conclusion that the Deluge was of universal extent. 

 As late as 1823, William Buckland, reader in geology in 

 Oxford, and later canon (1825) of Christ Church, and dean 

 (1845) of Westminster, published his Reliquia Diluviance, or 

 Observations on the Organic Remains Attesting the Action of 

 a Universal Deluge. 



The theory that the Mosaic deluge had any part in the 

 deposit of organic fossils was finally surrendered through the 

 advance of knowledge, owing mainly to the labors of Lyell 

 and his followers. 



The Comparison of Fossil and Living Animals. The very 

 great interest connected with the reestablish ment of the con- 

 clusion of Steno, that fossils were once alive, leads us to 



