sufficient to serve them for a
twelvemonth, could have been accommodated in the given space. It was a
sort of stock problem, that required, it was thought, no very high
attainments to solve. Eighty years have not yet passed since kind old
Samuel Johnson, in writing to little Miss Thrale a nice little letter,
recommending her to be a good girl, and to mind her arithmetic, advised
her to try the ark problem. "If you can borrow 'Wilkins' Real
Character,'" we find him saying to the young lady, "a folio which
perhaps the booksellers can let you have, you will have a very curious
calculation, _which you are qualified to consider_, to show that Noah's
ark was capable of holding all the known animals of the world, with
provision for all the time in which the earth was under water."
Unluckily, however, though the dimensions of the ark were known, the
animals of the world were not; and so the question, in at least one of
its terms, had to be very frequently restated. Let us take it as we find
it presented (drawn, however, from a much older source), in Sir Walter
Raleigh's magnificent "History of the World." "If in a ship of such
greatness," says this distinguished man, "we seek room for eighty-nine
distinct species of beasts, or, lest any should be omitted, for a
hundred several kinds, we shall easily find place both for them and for
the birds, which in bigness are no way answerable to them, and for meat
to sustain them all. For there are three sorts of beasts whose bodies
are of a quantity well known; the beef, the sheep, and the wolf; to
which the rest may be reduced by saying, according to Aristotle, that
one elephant is equal to four beeves, one lion to two wolves, and so of
the rest. Of beasts, some feed on vegetables, others on flesh. There are
one-and-thirty kinds of the greater sort feeding on vegetables, of which
number only three are clean, according to the law of Moses, whereof
seven of a kind entered into the ark, namely, three couples for breed,
and one odd one for sacrifice; the other eight-and-twenty kinds were
'taken by two of each kind; so that in all there were in the ark
one-and-twenty great beasts clean, and six-and-fifty unclean; estimable
for largeness as ninety-one beeves; yet, for a supplement (lest,
perhaps, any species be omitted), lot them be valued as a hundred and
twenty beeves. Of the lesser sort feeding on vegetables were in the ark
six-and-twenty kinds, estimable, with good allowance for supply, as