112 WRITINGS OF JAMES SMITHSON. 



time, have poured forth carbonic acid to saturate the im- 

 mensity of its waters ; and it is also utterly impossible to 

 believe that the beings in the ark, already not a little incon- 

 venienced for respiration, could withstand the suffocating- 

 effluvium. 



Coming of the Animals by Sea. 



Of the animals having been tropical ones no testimony is 

 offered. The elephant of Siberia being now ascertained to 

 have been a very hairy animal may be supposed to have 

 been a northern one, and if there were formerly northern 

 elephants, there may have been northern hyoenas and north- 

 ern tigers. 



If the bodies were brought by water, no reason appears 

 why they are, with the exception of a few birds, exclusively 

 those of quadrupeds. Reptiles, insects, trees, even fish, for 

 all of them must have perished from the mixture of salt 

 and fresh water, must have entangled in the clusters. 



As the bodies must have been macerated for about a year 

 in the tropical seas, before the retreat of the waters trans- 

 ported them towards the north, those of the smaller animals, 

 as the water-rats, must have been so completely decayed as 

 to be reduced to the bones solely, which water would not 

 float. 



The voyage from the tropics of the balls of album groecum 

 in an entire state, is what will not, under any circumstances, 

 be easy to admit; to suppose it amidst " turbulent vortices, 

 by which the framework of the animals was shattered, dis- 

 located, fractured within the integuments," reduced to splin- 

 ters, is utterly impossible. The entire state of the balls of 

 album groecum, and the extremely fractured one of the 

 bones, are totally incompatible on Mr. Penn's system. And 

 such an ablution would not have left in these balls a trace 

 of the triple phosphate. 



But quadrupeds are not the only animals of tropical 

 features found in northern latitudes. Every shell in the 

 strata, the nautili, the cornu ammones, the belemnites, the 



