an enormous expense of miracle, all the animals preserved by
_natural_ means by Noah would have had to be returned by _supernatural_
means to the regions whence by means _equally supernatural_ they had
been brought. The sloths and armadilloes,--little fitted by nature for
long journeys,--would have required to be ferried across the Atlantic to
the regions in which the remains of the megatherium and glyptodon lie
entombed; the kangaroo and wombat, to the insulated continent that
contains the bones of the extinct macropus and phalcolomys; and the New
Zealand birds, including its heavy flying quails and its wingless
wood-hen, to those remote islands of the Pacific in which the skeletons
of _Palapteryx ingens_ and _Dinornus giganteus_ lie entombed. Nor will
it avail aught to urge, with certain assertors of a universal deluge,
that during the cataclysm, sea and land changed their places, and that
what is now land had formed the bottom of the antediluvian ocean, and,
_vice versa_, what is now sea had been the land on which the first human
inhabitants of the earth increased and multiplied. No geologist who
knows how very various the ages of the several table-lands and mountain
chains in reality are could acquiesce in such an hypothesis; our own
Scottish shores,--if to the term of the existing we add that of the
ancient coast line,--must have formed the limits of the land from a time
vastly more remote than the age of the deluge. But even supposing, for
the argument's sake, the hypothesis recognized as admissible, what, in
the circumstances of the case, would be gained by the admission? A
continuous tract of land would have stretched,--when all the oceans were
continents and all the continents oceans,--between the South American
and the Asiatic coasts. And it is just possible that, during the hundred
and twenty years in which the ark was in building, a pair of sloths
might have crept by inches across this continuous tract, from where the
skeletons of the great megatheria are buried, to where the great vessel
stood. But after the Flood had subsided, and the change in sea and land
had taken place, there would remain for them no longer a roadway; and
so, though their journey outwards might, in all save the impulse which
led to it, have been altogether a natural one, their voyage homewards
could not be other than miraculous. Nor would the exertion of miracle
have had to be restricted to the transport of the _remoter_ travellers.
How