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what evidence we have rather goes in the other direction. We certainly 
have it on good evidence that some most extraordinary contortions have 
taken place in the strata of the world. Such are those mentioned by Pro- 
fessor Kamsay, who says that tracts of strata, as large as half an English 
county, have been turned completely upside down. Sir William Logan also 
found evidence in Canada that upset many former theories, including that 
of the azoic ages. And his book shows, that there have been such marvellous 
contortions of the strata of the earth, that we cannot rationally conceive them 
to have taken place without creating great elevations as well as depressions 
of the earth’s crust in many parts of the world ; and this would most likely 
affect the height of its mountains. It is clear from the way in which the 
earth’s crust has undulated, and has been rolled up and down, and waved 
about in various ways, that there must have been great depressions or eleva- 
tions, and probably both. Then again we can only measure the height of a 
mountain by the general sea-level, and very likely that also has greatly 
changed. There are also many exaggerated statements in Mr. Davison’s 
paper as to the way in which ignorant or sanguine people may have formerly 
regarded geology. For my own part I doubt very much whether there 
ever were any of these sanguine spirits, who have seen in every pebble or in 
every fossil evidence of a universal deluge. I must confess I never met 
them, or even heard of them before. I remember, when young, having 
often watched men while quarrying ; and when they have turned up “ fossils” 
from a great depth, some of them have said, “ Probably these are the results 
of the Flood ” ; but I never found them giving expression to that sanguine 
view, that every fossil in the world gave evidence of a universal deluge ! In 
the latter part of his paper Mr. Davison not only tells us that a universal 
deluge has been disproved by geology, but that it is impossible on other 
grounds ; and he quotes some old and not very eminent writers to show that 
the idea of a universal deluge had been given up years before our scientific 
knowledge reached its present position, and that those who held it had to 
propound fanciful theories, like that of Whiston’s, to support it. But I do 
not know why we should go back to Whiston and the others referred to. 
They wrote according to their own knowledge ; but even their theories 
were not more fanciful than some of those which we have had in our own 
day, and which have, for a time, been considered true. In our own time we 
have had the boasted nebular theory, which has had to be given up. Within a 
few months it has been discovered that the granite itself, contrary to all 
previous theories, is a metamorphosed sedimentary rock ; the very granite 
being nothing else than a watery deposit converted into its present state 
probably by the enormous pressure exerted in this globe, and by the trans- 
formations which are continually going on by crystallization. How then is it 
with the Deluge ? Certainly we must not be too positive as to the literal 
words of Scripture ; but we must be equally careful not to assume that 
everything now put forward as scientific is real science. For my own part 
I have simply had to unlearn, during the last twenty years, most of the 
scientific geological theories I was formerly taught ; and it has been the same 
