THE GEOLOGIST. 



OCTOBEK, 1861. 



WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE LUNAR SEAS 1 



Was there a deluge ? It is not to advocate any new reconciliation 

 theory we ask this question • it is not to urge afresh some supposed 

 contact with a comet (if we have just passed through the tail of one, 

 at most the harm we got was a few heavy showers) ; nor is it to show 

 that periodical inundations or oceanic overwhelmings of each hemi- 

 sphere — north and south — alternately take place every few thousand 

 years. Probably they do. But neither fifty deluges, nor ten thou- 

 sand, nor a hundred thousand, would make one deluge — A deluge. 

 Our purpose then is, to inquire whether there might not have been, 

 once upon a time, a physical natural cause for a deluge. As the crime 

 of the sinner is often the cause of the amendment of the law, so the 

 bold speculator, breaking out from the trammels of established dicta 

 and the fashionable propriety of a safe reserve, may, as Macdougal 

 Stuart in his daring ride across Australia opened out a luxuriant 

 country where geographers predicted a sandy desert, likewise break 

 in upon glorious fields before unknown. We have so many safe 

 respectabilities in geology that an erratic notion now and then cannot 

 do much harm, if it do no good. When we look up to the moon, what 

 do we see 1 Great ocean cavities and no water in them. It is of no 

 use to say it is all gathered up on the other side. We cannot believe 

 that. The moon always presents one side to our earth, and, therefore, 

 vol. iv. 2 x 



