324 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 Reliquie Diluviane, or 
Observations on the Organic Remains Altesting 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 reéstablishment of the con- 
clusion of Steno, that fossils were once alive, leads us to 
