proportionally shallower. In 1556, an entire province of the 
mountainous part of China sank in a moment, the whole of 
the inhabitants being destroyed, and an extensive lake occu- 
pying the position of the once prosperous province. In 1664, 
during some of those fearful earthquakes with which the 
Chilian coast is so frequently visited, several considerable 
mountains belonging to the chain of the Andes entirely 
disappeared. In Java, the volcano Papandayang also disap- 
peared in 1772. Passing over such remarkable phenomena 
as are presented by the ruins of the temple of Jupiter near 
Naples, and the appearance and subsequent disappearance of 
new islands, what can be more impressive than the accounts 
which have recently reached our shores of the subterranean 
convulsions which wrought such devastation along the entire 
western coast of South America, and asserted their presence 
even in the distant New Zealand ? We have no need to go 
back to mythic times for marvellous stories of the earth 
sinking, and the sea rushing upon the land. The present 
generation has witnessed phenomena more than enough to 
convince the veriest sceptic, that there are even now at work 
forces which require only the fiat of Omnipotence to reproduce 
the cataclysm which befell the antediluvians. 
Assuming that the Deluge was caused by the sinking of 
that part of the world which the antediluvians inhabited, and, 
along with floods of rain for six weeks, the consequent irrup- 
tion of the sea upon the land,. Dr. Pye Smith, and after him 
Mr. Hugh Miller, have attempted to define the area which 
might have been submerged. Let us state the hypothesis in 
Miller's own words : — 
“ There is a remarkable portion of the globe, chiefly in the Asiatic continent, 
though it extends into Europe, and which is nearly equal to all Europe in 
area, whose rivers (some of them, such as the Volga, the Oural, the Sihon, the 
Kour, and the Amoo, of great size) do not fall into the ocean, or into any of 
the many seas which communicate with it. They are, on the contrary, all 
turned inwards , if I may so express myself, losing themselves in the eastern 
parts of the tract, in the lakes of a rainless district, in which they supply but 
the waste of evaporation ; and falling in the western parts into seas, such as 
the Caspian and the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still 
under the level of the ocean. The shore line of the Caspian, for example, is 
rather more than eighty-three feet beneath that of the Black Sea, and some 
of the great flat steppes which spread out around it, such as what is known 
as the Steppe of Astracan, have a mean level of about thirty feet beneath 
that of the Baltic. Were there a trench-like strip of country that com- 
municated between the Caspian and the Gulf of Finland, to be depressed 
beneath the level of the latter sea, it would so open up the fountains of the 
