91 
As I conceive, the great change was effected then, and Nature’s 
operations have gone on since in comparative quietness. 
Murchison arrived at the conclusion that the fossil mammalia 
at Folks tone were destroyed “ by violent oscillations of the land, 
and were swept by currents of water from their feeding- places 
into the hollows where we now find them.” {Quart. Joum. Geol. 
Soc., vol. vii. p. 386.) Hopkins, in reviewing the question of 
the Drift, agrees with Murchison in supposing that the Wealden 
area has been traversed by waves of translation, and in attri- 
buting to such agencies much of the drift phenomena. {Ibid. 
vol. viii. p. li.) See in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. 154, 
pp. 250 and 286, the views of Mr. Brest, wich, who does not admit 
purely cataclysmic action. 
These instances may be enough to show that geologists have 
been led by observation and discussion of facts, apart from any a 
priori dynamical theory, to conclusions agreeing in very import- 
ant points with results derivable from the theory which I have 
proposed in this essay. That theory may consequently be con- 
sidered to be capable of embracing in its explanations the classes 
of facts from which those conclusions of the geologists were 
deduced, and on that account to be entitled to additional 
confidence. 
Before concluding, it will be right to advert to an argument 
which might be drawn from geological facts against certain 
statements in the book of Genesis, indirectly connected with 
the account of the Deluge. According to our theory, palaeolithic 
men were contemporaries of the antediluvians.' Now, it is 
stated in Gen. ii. 17 — 21, that the descendants of Cain in the 
sixth generation had arrived at a degree of civilization and art 
of which there is no trace in the palaeolithic race, so far as 
may be judged from their implements and mode of life with 
which geology has made us acquainted, which prove, in fact, 
that they were mere savages ; on the other hand it is to be 
said that this character of the inhabitants of the parts which 
geologists have scrutinized may be owing to the distance of 
those parts from the centres of aggregation and civilization of 
the antediluvians, which centres may all have been submerged, 
in fulfilment of the declared purpose of the Deluge, and 
possibly may have remained submerged, like the sunken 
forests near the coast of Norfolk. Ethnological considerations 
seem to point to the conclusion that the earth was repeopled 
by Noah and his sons, no other designations of the large 
divisions of the human family having been so generally 
accepted by ethnologists as those derived from Shem, Ham, 
and Japhet. This family must have handed down to post- 
