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other. The erratic boulders found in every quarter of the 
globe could not have been deposited by the Deluge, for the 
sites which they occupy indicate that they were deposited at 
periods between which many ages intervened. The bone- 
caves could not have been furnished by the Deluge, for the 
alternating layers of stalagmite and remains of animals, which 
evidently lived, and died, and preyed upon each other for 
successive generations, can be explained by no sudden catas- 
trophe like the Flood. Hence the phenomena which, less than 
a hundred years ago, were supposed to furnish incontestable 
evidence of the occurrence and the universality of the Noachian 
Deluge, are found to belong to a period loug anterior. 
Disappointing though this discovery must have been to the 
sanguine spirits who saw in every fossil and in every pebble 
evidences of a universal deluge, Geology did not send them 
away empty from her prolific fields. She gave them unmis- 
takeably to understand, that she could furnish them with no 
proofs of the occurrence of that Deluge which is recorded in 
Genesis ; and warned them that the facts on which they had 
been accustomed to rely would not sustain the evidential 
superstructure they were attempting to rear upon them. But 
while her testimony upon this point was unfaltering and deci- 
sive, she reminded them, that they had only to study her stony 
records in order to find endless illustrations of such catas- 
trophes as that to which the Mosaic narrative points us. 
Geology could supply no proofs of the Noachian Deluge (at 
least so far as the general field of investigation was concerned), 
but she could supply a thousand proofs of occurrences of a 
similar kind. She could not supply the very bones of the 
wicked contemporaries of Noah, but she could point to the 
bones of many races which had successively disappeared from 
the globe. She could not demonstrate how the great deep 
overflowed the land, when “ the world of the ungodly ” 
perished, but she could point to many evidences of the sea 
and the dry land changing places ; of mountains, like the 
Alps, once standing like solitary islands in the Ocean ; and of 
majestic rivers and lakes once existing, where all that now 
remains of them are their buried beds. The testimony of 
geology, therefore, in relation to the Deluge, is most important, 
as establishing not only the possibility, but the probability, of 
such an occurrence. A catastrophe which would deluge a 
continent, and destroy its existing races, instead of being 
incredible, is, from a geological stand-point, neither strange 
nor unparallelled. 
Some have maintained that we ought not to expect evi- 
dences of the occurrence of the Flood among the superficial 
