an
affords,--'under the whole heavens!'" So far Dr. Kitto. But his argument
seems to be not more valuable in this case than in the other. It was
upon the nations that were "UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVENS" that Deity
represented himself as putting the fear and dread of the children of
Israel; but he would be certainly a very "plain man" who would infer
from the universality of a passage so evidently metonymic, that that
fear extended to the people of Japan on the one hand, or to the Red
Indians of the Rocky Mountains on the other. The phrase "_under the
whole heavens_" seems to be but coextensive in meaning with the phrase
"upon the face of the whole earth." The "whole earth" is evidently
tantamount to the whole terrestrial floor,--the "whole heavens," to the
whole celestial roof that arches over it; and on what principle the
whole terrestrial floor is to be deemed less extensive than the floor
under the whole celestial roof, really does not appear. Further, nothing
can be more certain than that both the phrases contrasted by Dr. Kitto
are equally employed in the metonymic form.

When, however, the doctor passes to argument based upon natural science,
we find what he adduces worthy of our attention, were it but for the
inquiries which it suggests. "If the deluge were but local," we find him
saying, "what was the need of taking _birds_ into the ark; and among
them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove? A deluge which
could overspread the region which these birds inhabit could hardly have
been less than universal. If the deluge were local, and all the birds of
these kinds in that district perished,--though we should think they
might have fled to the uninundated regions,--it would have been useless
to encumber the ark with them, seeing that the birds of the same species
which survived in the lands not overflowed would speedily replenish the
inundated tract as soon as the waters subsided." It will be found that
the reasoning here is mainly based upon an error in natural science,
into which even naturalists of the last century, such as Buffon, not
unfrequently fell, and which was almost universal among the earlier
voyagers and travellers,--the error of confounding as identical the
merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of thus
assigning to _species_ wide areas in creation which in reality they do
not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or
rather _family_; for it consists of more