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the first race of men from a rude to a civilized state, •will not affect 
the present object of inquiry. A period sufficiently long to allow 
a prodigious increase of the vegetation which adorned the surface 
of the earth, must have elapsed, whilst the first families of man- 
kind were thus emerging from a state of rudeness to that of civili- 
zation. For during that period in which a people exist only in a 
state of nature, as it is termed, the wants which they feel, and 
consequently the arts which they cultivate, being few, necessity 
will but seldom oblige them to level the trees of their surrounding 
forests. Thus uninterrupted, the earth, which has been assumed to 
have been well clothed, even immediately after its formation, must, 
in the succeeding early ages, have teemed, in almost every part of 
its surface, with vegetable life. 
From the same records we learn, that, after the earth had existed 
during the period of sixteen hundred years, the Almighty decreed 
that a flood of waters should be brought upon the earth, and that 
the earth should be thus destroyed. All the fountains of the great 
deep, we learn, were broken up, and the windows of heaven were 
opened. Forty days and forty nights it rained upon the earth, all 
the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered, and 
the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days*. 
Various objections have been offered against this, the Mosaic, 
account of the deluge. Men of the greatest learning and piety 
have doubted, whether the relation should be taken literally or 
not; and have differed very much, in their opinions, as to the 
extent to which this astonishing revolution of the earth reached. 
Some have doubted the existence of a sufficient quantity of water 
to deluge the highest mountains of the earth ; whilst others, among 
whom may be mentioned the Right Rev. Bishop of Clogher, have 
imagined, that the deluge should not be considered as having 
* Genesis vii. 
