WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE LUNAR SEAS 1 413 



face of the earth. Whether the transference would be in "forty- 

 days and forty nights," or not, we do not pretend to say. Sudden 

 and rapid might be that of the last remaining portions of the moon's 

 oceans, when the atmospheric pressure was reduced to its minimum, 

 and torrential rains might be thus produced on our earth — not a 

 total submergence of the land beneath one uniform sea of waters, but 

 such a condition of inundations and torrents as might well be regarded 

 as a universal flood. 



Mr. Downes has shown, with good reason, that comets may be 

 frozen-up worlds of water-ice and solidified air, the effect of the intense 

 cold of the vastly distant space to which in their excentric courses 

 they reach out, and where the sun can seem no bigger than a point 

 or a tiny twinkling star. Comets, therefore, might bring watery 

 vapour and air to our atmosphere ; but comets are not one, but many. 

 Every year or every century might, if comets were the cause, witness 

 a deluge. What might have happened once could happen twice or 

 fifty times, and comets hence can be no more regarded as the cause of 

 an universal deluge than the regular cyclical oscillations of the earth's 

 poles in 20,000 years. The transference of the moon's water to the 

 earth could happen but once. The torrential nature of the final rains of 

 such an occurrence might well produce on the terror-stricken minds 

 of men, or the imaginative mind of the historian, the idea of the 

 " windows of heaven being opened, and the fountains of the deep 

 broken up." If Mr. Airy be right, that an atmosphere extends 

 now to the moon, we can scarcely consider that our own atmosphere 

 extends as a regular enveloping sphere up to the moon's surface, 

 because if it did so, one would think the moon would wrap herself 

 up in a mantle of it ; but rather should we not presume that the 

 moon raises by her attraction up to herself the apex of a vast atmo- 

 spheric tide ? and if so, the roadway of the lunar rains is still extant. 



Nor do we wish to assign any particular period to the supposed 

 transference of the moon's waters to the earth. It might as well 

 have happened in the carboniferous age as in the tertiary or re- 

 cent. It might have occupied millions of years, and have influenced 

 for ages the meteorological conditions of our atmosphere. But if 

 geology points specially to any particular time we think it does so to 

 the Loess and loam-period, when the deposits seem to give evidence 



