l deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, first in his
Dissertation drawn up for the Academy at Bologna, and next in his
article on shells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up the
question as charged with one of the evidences of that Revelation which
it was the great design of his life to subvert. And with an unfairness
too characteristic of his sparkling but unsolid writings, we find him
arguing, that all fossil shells were either those of fresh water lakes
and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or of land snails developed in
unusual abundance during wet ones; or that they were shells which had
been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land
to their homes; or that they were shells that had gone astray from
cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not shells at all, but
mere shell-like forms, produced by some occult process of nature in the
bowels of the earth. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the
Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in
his attempts to neutralize that Palaeontologic evidence on which
geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he
only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every
sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a
reaction against the special school of infidelity which he had founded,
that at length bore it down. He wrote in the middle of the Paris basin,
with its multitude of fossil shells and bones; and, when penning his
article for the Encyclopaedia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the
shell-charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before him; but
the deluge had to be put down, whatever the nature or bearing of the
facts; and so he could find in either no evidence of a time when the sea
had covered the land. He found, instead, only "some mussels, because
there were ponds in the neighborhood." As for the "spiral petrifactions
termed _cornu ammonis_," of which the Jurassic Alps are full, they were
not nautili, he said; they could be nothing else than reptiles; seeing
that reptiles take almost always the form of a spiral when not in
motion; and it was surely more likely, that when petrified they should
still retain the spiral disposition, than that "the Indian Ocean should
have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." Were there not,
however, real shells of the Syrian type in France and Italy? Perhaps
so. But ought "we not to