fourscore sheep. Of those which devour flesh were two-and-thirty kinds,
answerable to threescore and four wolves. All these two hundred and
eighty beasts might be kept in one story or room of the ark, in their
several cabins; their meat in a second; the birds and their provision in
a third, with space to spare for Noah and his family, and all their
necessaries." Such was the calculation of the great voyager Raleigh,--a
man who had a more practical acquaintance with _stowage_ than perhaps
any of the other writers who have speculated on the capabilities of the
ark; and his estimate seems sober and judicious. It will be seen,
however, that from the vast increase in our knowledge of the mammals
which has taken place since the age in which the "History of the World"
was written, the calculation which embraced all the eighty-nine known
animals of that time would embrace those of but a single centre of
creation now; and that the estimate of Sir Walter tells, in consequence,
on the side, not of a universal, but of a partial deluge.

As man extended his acquaintance with the mammals, he found their number
greatly increasing on his hands. Button, like Raleigh, though a
professed naturalist, and a writer of admirable genius, had no very
distinct notions of species. He was inclined to question whether even
the ass might not be merely a degraded horse; and confounded many of the
mammals of the New World with their representative congeners in the Old.
And yet, in summing up his history of the mammaliferous division, he
could state, that though it included descriptions of "a hundred and
thirty-four different species of creatures that suckled their young,
many of which had not been observed or described before," it was
necessarily incomplete, as there were still others to add to the list,
for whose history there existed no materials. At the same time he
remarked, however, that the "number of quadruped animals whose existence
is certain and well established does not amount to more than two
hundred on the surface of the known world." Yet here was the extreme
estimate made by Raleigh, with what he deemed large allowance for the
unknown animals, fairly doubled; and under the hands of more
discriminating naturalists, and in the inevitable course of discovery,
the number has so enormously increased, that the "eighty-nine distinct
species" known to the great voyager have been represented during the
last thirty years by the one thousand mammal