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diluvians the knowledge of art and the skill they had attained 
to before the Flood, which they gave proof of in the building of 
an ark; for otherwise the science and civilization which eastern 
nations were in possession of at no long interval after the 
Flood can hardly be accounted for. It is true that we learn 
from geology that the neolithic postdiluvians were also savages, 
who gained their livelihood for the most part by hunting ; but 
their implements exhibit a much higher amount of art and 
polish than those of their palaeolithic predecessors (in con- 
sequence, it may be, of the influence of advancement in know- 
ledge and art in the new centres of civilization), and, in fact, 
admit of favourable comparison with implements that have 
been used in this nineteenth century in islands of the Pacific by 
our contemporaries. For these reasons it cannot be affirmed 
that the revelations of geology respecting the degree and the 
stages of art among the Palaeolithic and Neolithic races are con- 
tradictory to the statements in Gen. ii. 17 — 21. 
From the whole preceding argument, I draw the following 
conclusion. Since it has been shown in Division III. of the 
argument, that many geological facts and phenomena indicative 
of the violent action, at a certain epoch, of a widely extended 
cataclysm, may be accounted for by a dynamical theory of 
physical causation, which, at the same time, as shown in 
Division II., explains the recorded facts of the Noachian Deluge, 
being, in fact, suggested by them, it is reasonable to conclude 
that the cataclysm of geology and the Deluge of Scripture are 
identical events (only one such having befallen the human 
race), and that so far as the reality of the former is established 
by physical science, the reality of the other may be inclusively 
inferred. Also, it follows, as a corollary from the general 
argument, that geological science does not actually point either 
to a deluge-epoch, or an antiquity of man, that can be shown 
to be inconsistent with historical statements in the book of 
Genesis.* 
* Before this paper appears in the Journal I beg permission to add in a 
note, that on reconsideration of the arguments in Section III., from which 
I infer that the largest of existing mountain-ranges were elevated at the 
epoch of the Deluge, I have come to the conclusion that the contemporaneous 
changes in the contours and positions of continents and islands, caused by 
the disruption of the earth’s crust and its floating on the interior liquid mass, 
might have been of much greater intensity and extent than, at first, 1 ventured 
to surmise, and might account for the occurrence, within a comparatively brief 
interval, of phenomena which have been supposed to extend over periods of 
incalculable length. For instance, the discovery of remains of arctic fauna 
in temperate regions, and the reverse phenomenon, might be explained by a 
transfer of the floating habitats of the animals from one position to another 
on the earth’s surface ; and the existence in caves (as in Kent’s cavern) of 
