Dr Fleming on the Geological Deluge. 233 
mud in caves, is the absence of similarity of colour and compo- 
sition in different districts. In the mud of the geological deluge, 
produced from the wreck of Norway and England, or rather of 
the whole surface of the earth, we might expect the exhibition 
of a common character in all caves. But when different caves 
have mud of a particular local character, the inference is obvious, 
that the causes concerned in its production have likewise been 
local . 
IV. Extinct Animals.— If ever a sudden, universal, and im- 
petuous flood, sweeped our island in its fury, land animals must 
have been drowned and carried off, or, as Professor Buckland 
expresses himself, 44 every thing that lay without, on the ante- 
diluvian surface, must have been swept far away, and scattered 
by the violence of the diluvian waters ”—(Rel. DU. 39.) If we 
admit the truth of this statement, we should not expect in our 
country a single skeleton of a native animal, in our gravel, or 
loam, or in caves. Y et it is admitted that numerous relics of land 
animals, which lived and died in the country, are generally dis- 
tributed in gravel, loam and caves. I am inclined at once to 
conclude, from these premises, that no such geological deluge 
ever occurred. Nor is other evidence wanting to justify the 
same conclusion. If these remains 44 were drifted from other 
countries to those in which we find them,” we may ask, from what 
countries ? Not from tropical regions, for the species of hyaena, 
elephant, and rhinoceros, the remains of which occur in our su- 
perficial strata, never were tropical animals, although from name 
the general reader may be betrayed to such an opinion. If these 
remains 44 floated backwards and forwards by the flux and re- 
flux of the mighty currents then in motion, before the carcases 
became putrid, and the bones fell piecemeal into the gravel, as 
the agitation subsided,” then should we expect to find the relics 
of the animals of arctic, temperate, and tropical regions, mingled 
in the same gravel ; in other words, all the laws which regulate 
the physical distribution of animals would have been violated, 
and our gravel-beds would have been full of the monuments of 
the rebellion. Yet there is no such confusion ; consequently 
there have been no such mighty currents. 
Perhaps the most interesting fact in the history of the relics 
