123 
the Mosaic Cosmogony, or the narrative of the Deluge ; and 
that thus, the Interpreters of Nature and the Interpreters of 
Scripture fighting no longer against each other, or standing 
coldly aloof; but shoulder to shoulder in the great battle for 
the truth,' should unitedly carry their splendid spoils to His 
altar, who is at once the God of Nature and the God of the 
Bible — the Great Creator and the Great Redeemer. This 
spirit, becoming alike the philosopher and the Christian, we 
must endeavour to carry into the investigations which are 
now to occupy our attention. 
So much has been written upon the Noachian Deluge, both 
before and since Geology took its place among the sciences, 
that it would be presumptuous to pretend to originality in 
this paper. My business is not so much to discover, as to 
examine carefully what laborious explorers have already dis- 
covered. I occupy the position, not so much of a barrister, 
who skilfully arranges his evidence so as to procure a verdict 
in his favour, as of a judge, who reviews and sifts the evi- 
dence which has been presented, in order that truth may 
triumph. 
If such an occurrence took place as that Deluge which is 
reported in the Book of Genesis, we might reasonably expect 
that traditions of it, more or less correct, would be found float- 
ing through all ages and in all countries. A devastating 
Flood which destroyed the whole human race save those eight 
persons who were miraculously preserved in the ark, would 
be sure to leave an indelible impression upon the world's 
memory. Hence, if the history of the Deluge contained in 
the Bible had been unsupported by widely diffused traditions, 
there would have been some reason for the existence of doubts 
as to the occurrence of such a catastrophe. But just as we 
have in the Elysian Fields and in the Golden Age, which 
bathed their first inhabitants in blessedness, traditions of that 
Paradise, in which, in a state of holy innocence, God placed 
the progenitors of our race, so have we, on every hand, tradi- 
tions of the Deluge, by which ff the world of the ungodly 33 
was swept of its inhabitants. So redundant are these tradi- 
tions, that in the examination of them, one scarcely knows 
where to begin, or what outstanding illustrations to fix upon. 
The island of Atlantis, at the suggestion of Jupiter, immersed 
in the Ocean, in order that the depravity of its inhabitants 
might be washed away ; the prominence given to an ark, or 
ship, in many of the heathen mysteries; the representations 
of undoubted facts in the Noachian history, on the coins of 
Greece and among the hieroglyphics of Egypt ; the picture 
on the famous Apamaean medal, belonging to the time of the 
k 2 
