noah's deluge. 113 
they occur in the greatest ahundance. Pallas says that from the 
Don to Kamschatka there is scarcely a river whose hank does not 
afford remains of the mammoth or elephant. The bones are 
generally dispersed, seldom occurring in complete skeletons. Jt 
was long denied that they are the remains of the elephant, and 
asserted that they are lusus naturae, bones of giants, skeletons of 
fallen angels, &c. When there could no longer be any doubt on 
this point, a new difficulty arose. But two living species of ele- 
phant are known ; the Asiatic and the African, both of which are 
inhabitants of a warm climate. But the bones in question are 
found in the greatest abundance along the northern border of the 
empire of Russia, a region locked up in eternal frost. The quan- 
tity of the ivory furnished annually to the arts by that quarter of 
the world is by no means inconsiderable. 
These facts suggested one of the celebrated theories of the de- 
luge; that namely, which attributes it to a change in the position 
of the earth's axis, and represents that the antediluvian world spun 
around an axis terminating in the main Atlantic and Pacific 
oceans, so that northern Asia, and the eastern part of Africa, be- 
longed to the equatorial regions. 
This theory is refuted by a number of independent arguments. 
An experiment furnished by the whirling-table is alone decisive. 
It proves that a yielding body revolving rapidly, assumes the 
figure of an oblate spheroid. The earth has this figure, the shorter 
diameter being along its present axis. We formerly inferred, 
(sec 43), that the earth assumed its present form at the creation, 
or when it was in a fluid or semifluid state, in consequence of its 
motion on its axis. If the axis of revolution had been changed 
subsequently ; after the consolidation of the rocks ; though the 
water would flow towards the new equator, the solid crust would 
have become too rigid and unyielding to accommodate itself accu- 
rately to the new condition of the forces acting upon it. The 
earth must therefore have revolved before the deluge, in the same 
manner as at present, and the position of its axis can have under- 
gone no change at that time. 
But further ; the fossil elephants whose remains are so exten- 
sively distributed over the globe were of species different from any 
that now exist, and one species at least was fitted to inhabit a cold 
climate. The bones themselves show that they belonged to species 
that are now extinct. About the beginning of the present cen- 
tury, an individual that must have been frozen up soon after its 
death, was disengaged by the melting of the ice in which it had 
been enveloped, from a high bank near the mouth of a river in 
the north of Siberia. The Indian and African elephants are 
naked. This was furnished with three kinds of hair: one was 
stiff black bristles a foot or more in length, a second, thinner 
bristles or coarse flexible hair of a reddish brown color, and the 
third, course reddish brown wool, which grew among the roots 
of the long hair. More than thirty pounds weight of the hair 
