sional enforced fraternization (hiring local inundations, 
and prairie conflagrations, of wild animals, such as bears, 
pumas, jaguars, &c. , with deer and other ruininants, 
and man, upon isolated spots of apparent safety. Beasts 
of prey, driven from their dens by hunger, would 
seek along the diminishing shores of their rugged fastnesses 
for carcases of drowned animals, and the gnawed bones of 
such as drifted within their reach would be left to transmit to 
future ages collateral evidence to the truth of the wondrous 
tale, recorded in Scripture, that at one period since the 
advent of man upon the earth, the waters rose to the tops of 
the mountains. Icebergs are stated to have been met with 
inter.stratified with soil containing mammoth and other 
bones. The stranding of a whale ship upon such a berg is 
not an impossible contingency, for facts are on record, of 
abandoned ice-bound ships, loosed by the annual break-up 
of the ice floes, being drifted ofl' amongst ice attached to a 
floating berg. Carried into lower latitudes by the polar 
currents conveying streams of dense and gelid water to 
replace the waste caused by the vast evaporation from sea 
surfaces in the tropics, the berg might ground upon any 
coast line, and gradually melt and disappear, leaving local 
evidences, similar to those now relied on by geologists, of 
association of man's remains, or relies of his handicraft, with 
bones of ruminants and other animals long deemed extinct 
upon such shores, to prove the vast antiquity of man beyond 
the period assigned by Holy Scripture. What wonder is it 
to find traces alleged to conflict with Scriptural truth on such 
subjects — -of results of successive landslips, undermined from 
lands exposed to the raging waves and overwhelming torrents 
( if a displaced ocean ; causing the disintegration of sedimentary 
strata; or, excavation of vast ravines, gorges, and valleys ; with 
any deposit therein of the heterogeneous contents of the then 
chaotic confusion of materials, riven from the solid crust of 
the earth \ What wonder is it when forests of fir, beach, 
and oak are disclosed as successively deposited in substrata 
of a country not now producing such varieties of timber 3 
What wonder is it to find beneath such layers of drift, that 
— as with gold drifts — substances of great specific gravity, 
such as flint implements, have sunk to the lowest stratum of 
the mechanically-commingled earthy debris of the "mud of 
great waters " f is not the agency of irrupted oceans seeking 
to re-arrange their volume in conformity with the law of 
gravitation, and oscillating in vast tidal waves over the face 
of the earth, adequate to accomplish, by the one catastrophe 
of Noah's Flood, much that geologists represent as the work 
