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 
iu 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 
