SUMMARY OF FACTS PROVING AN UNIVERSAL DELUGE. 227 
the whole world; in situations to which no torrents or rivers that 
are now in action could ever have drifted them. 
V. The nature of this gravel, being in part composed of the 
wreck of the neighbouring hills, and partly of fragments and blocks 
that have been transported from very distant regions. 
VI. The nature and condition of the organic remains peculiar to 
this gravel; many of them being identical with, and others not di¬ 
stinguishable from, species that now exist, and very few having under¬ 
gone the smallest process of mineralization. Their condition resembles 
that of common grave bones, being in so recent a state and having 
undergone so little decay, that if the records of history, and the cir¬ 
cumstances that attend them, did not absolutely forbid such a sup¬ 
position, we should be inclined to attribute them even to a much 
later period than the deluge: and certainly there is in my opinion 
no single fact connected with them, that should lead us to date their 
origin from any more ancient era*. 
VII. The total impossibility of referring any one of these ap¬ 
pearances to the effect of ancient or modern rivers, or any other 
* This gravel contains also rolled fragments of various organic bodies, more ancient 
than those we are now considering, and which were embedded in the strata of whose 
detritus the gravel is composed ; e. g. belemnites, corals, oyster-shells, from the chalk 
and oolite formations, &c.: these are wholly distinct from the organic remains, which 
are peculiar to diluvium; the latter being chiefly the bones of quadrupeds that 
inhabited the land, and the shells of mollusc® that inhabited the sea at the period 
immediately preceding the inundation, by which the gravel in question was formed. 
The shells accumulated in the diluvial gravel of Suffolk and Norfolk, and known 
locally by the name of Crag, are an example of the remains I now allude to. They appear 
to be marine shells, drifted inland from the bottom of the antediluvian ocean, by the 
same currents that produced the gravel through which they are now dispersed, in the 
cliffs along the coast, and over the interior of these counties; and with very few excep¬ 
tions, they agree in species with shells that at present inhabit the adjacent seas. 
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