626 THE UNIVERSE. 



great disturbances among the ancient oceans. Some, as 

 we have seen, gave rise to those disastrous inundations 

 mentioned in the cosmogony of every race possessed of 

 written annals. According to Messrs. d'Omalius d'Halloy, 

 Beudant, and Elie de Beaumont, the most imposing catas- 

 trophe of historic times, our Mosaic deluge, was probably 

 only the effect of the mightiest upheaval of the globe, that 

 of the Andes; and the uplifting of America above the ocean, 

 which was the result of this, gave rise to the immeasurable 

 flood which broke tumultuously against the old continent. 



In his work on cataclysms M. Frederick Klee has laid 

 down some very remarkable views on this subject. Ac- 

 cording to him the axis of the globe has suffered displace- 

 ments, and it was the last of these that occasioned that 

 terrible event the deluge. 



Nothing checks M. Klee in his daring conceptions. He 

 even thinks that some of the contemporaries of this great 

 telluric revolution may have passed safely through it, and 

 that to those who thus survived we owe the legends which 

 erudition has discovered in some ancient writings. Ac- 

 cording to this geologist, it is to the witnesses of this 

 irresistible convulsion that we must ascribe the mythical 

 traditions, in which it is said that during the catastrophe 

 of the deluge the sun, moon, and stars changed their places 

 in the heavens. 



If, indeed, the axis of the globe had been displaced, man, 

 regarding the earth then as being immovable and in the 

 centre of the universe, would naturally think it was the 

 stars which had deviated from their path across the celes- 

 tial fields.^ 



1 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, long before M. Klee, had enunciated a sj'stem 

 exactly corresponding to that of this geologist. He believed that it -was the suc- 

 cessive increase in the tropical vegetation and of the polar ices that made the globe 

 move alternately one way and another. According to our celebrated writer this 



