196 
Oi\ THE CREATION AND 
been submerged. This, certainly, would be a very accommodating 
recourse ; but such conjectures do not merit a moment’s consider¬ 
ation : consequently, we must admit that the animals of America 
originated on the very soil which to this present day they still 
inhabit. 
The Rev. W. Kirby, author of one of the Bridgwater Treatises, 
has laboured uncommonly hard to reconcile the Mosaic account 
with zoological facts ; and well knowing that if the original 
creation only comprehended a male and a female of each 
species, or that one pair only was reserved from an universal 
deluge, that the carnivorous animals must have perished with 
hunger, or have annihilated most of the other species, he states 
that the instincts of the beasts of prey are restrained for the 
time being, and that they must have eaten grass or straw, like 
the ox, and neither injured nor destroyed their fellow beasts of a 
more harmless character, and that this harmony of the animal crea¬ 
tion continued long enough after the fall to allow sufficient time 
for such a multiplication of the flocks and herds, and flights and 
shoals of gregarious animals, as would secure them from ex¬ 
tinction.” 
Such an assumption is at variance with all our knowledge of 
living nature. The author first alters the natural instincts of the 
ferocious hyaena, the lordly lion, and the treacherous tiger, who, 
by one sweep of his magic wand are turned into herbivorous 
and ruminating beasts; but in his haste to provide for the pre¬ 
dacious animals he has altogether forgotten the carnivorous birds 
of the air, together with the amphibiae, amongst whom are found 
the most determined enemies to man, the rattle-snake, the boa, 
and the cobra di capella—animals that convert the vicinities of 
their abodes into solitary deserts—these, all these, are left to 
starve, unless they likewise eat straw and hay like the ox. Such 
opinions as these are, indeed, at variance with all our knowledge of 
living nature : why should we embrace an hypothesis so full of 
contradictions, in order to give to an allegory a literal construction 
and the character of revelation, which is so much the less necessary 
here, because we do not follow the same rule in other points. 
The astronomer does not pourtray the heavenly motions, or lay 
down the laws which govern them, according to the statements 
in the Jewish Scriptures; nor does the geologist think it neces¬ 
sary to modify the results of experience according to the contents 
of the Mosiac writings. 
The Mosiac account of the deluge is insufficient to account 
for the geological phenomena observed in the different strata 
of the earth ; and the result has been, that the students of 
the science have alternately dis-associated the system entirely 
