594 PHYSICAL GEOG&APHY. 



We know that the kangaroos and emus of New Holland, the llamas of Peru, the sloths, 

 armadilloes, and ant-eaters of Paraguay, to mention no other instances, never could 

 have accomplished the passage from the places of their location to any central part of the 

 Old World, and back again, from the scene where the ark of Noah was set afloat, by 

 natural means. Neither can the polar bear and the hippopotamus, the ostrich and the eider 

 fowl, the reindeer and the giraffe, to refer to no more examples, exist together in a state of 

 nature, requiring a great diversity of climate ; and supposing them aggregated by the 

 Divine Power, and sustained in a common temperature, the difficulty of conceiving a 

 building capable of accommodating a tenth of the single parent pairs of all the species, is 

 prodigious. The difficulty increases when we consider the vast number of freshwater fish, 

 and reptiles of the rivers, to be provided for. To supernatural agency, indeed, all things 

 are possible ; but when nothing is said of its action in the record when the object, imagined 

 to have been effected by it, must have been to a great extent useless and when the con- 

 gregation of the animals is represented as in the main the work of Noah, we may surmise 

 that a transaction local in its nature, and comparatively limited in its extent, is the subject 

 of the relation. This opinion, which zoological considerations favour, is not opposed to the 

 narrative, expounded in harmony with Oriental forms of speech, and with the genius of 

 Scripture diction when treating of physical events ; for it is consonant with both to 

 employ universal terms with reference to local circumstances, and to express in descrip- 

 tions of physical phenomena the optical appearance, and not the philosophic reality. In 

 fact, the universa terra, or the whole earth, of the book of Genesis, which was sub- 

 merged, becomes the Uwvpticrt, or the inhabited world, of a subsequent writer in the 

 sacred volume ; and if this were the place to handle the question, it might readily be 

 shown, that at the diluvian era there had been no great multiplication of the human race, 

 and consequently no wide dispersion of them. The fact of their circumscribed limits 

 furnishes a presumption in favour of a partial deluge ; for, to accomplish the "judgment of 

 ungodly men," confined to a small part of the earth's superficies, by bringing a flood of 

 waters upon the existing continents, and at the same time suspending the ordinary laws 

 of nature, in collecting from distant lands, and sustaining at a common focus, live pairs of 

 the animal races accustomed to different climates, and addicted to discordant habits 

 this would be, to say the least, a vast superfluity, and to a great extent an unmeaning 

 catastrophe. When no recognised principle of interpretation is violated by a contrary 

 hypothesis, which accords with zoological conclusions, we may reasonably believe the 

 Noachian deluge to have been limited to the world of man probably the western region 

 of Central Asia the native seat of most of the domesticated animals and the cereal 

 grasses, upon which the food, clothing, and convenience of mankind depend, reproductive 

 examples being preserved, to minister to the wants of the patriarchal family, and to 

 multiply and migrate, in the train of their posterity, to the far^distant regions to which 

 they have wandered. 



