many years have made it a subject of special
study. It is not by "bidding down" the age of the extinct or quiescent
volcanoes by a species of blind haggling, or by presuming mistake in the
calculations regarding them, simply because mistakes are possible and
have sometimes been made, that that portion of the cumulative evidence
against a universal deluge which they furnish is to be neutralized or
set aside. The argument on the general question _is_ a cumulative one;
and while many of its component portions are of themselves so
conclusive, that only supposititious miracle, and not presentable
argument, can be arrayed against them, its aggregate force seems wholly
irresistible. In passing, however, from the facts and reasonings that
bear against the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to indicate in a few
sentences both the possible mode in which a merely partial flood might
have taken place, and the probable extent of area which it covered, I
shall have to remove from very strong to comparatively weak
ground,--from what can be maintained as argument, to what can at best be
but offered as conjecture.

There is a remarkable portion of the globe, chiefly in the Asiatic
continent, though it extends into Europe, and which is nearly equal to
all Europe in area, whose rivers (some of them, such as the Volga, the
Oural, the Sihon, the Kour, and the Amoo, of great size) do not fall
into the ocean, or into any of the many seas which communicate with it.
They are, on the contrary, all _turned inwards_, if I may so express
myself; losing themselves, in the eastern parts of the tract, in the
lakes of a rainless district, in which they supply but the waste of
evaporation, and falling, in the western parts, into seas such as the
Caspian and the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still
under the level of the ocean. The shore line of the Caspian, for
instance, is rather more than eighty-three feet beneath that of the
Black Sea; and some of the great flat steppes which spread out around
it, such as what is known as the Steppe of Astracan, have a mean level
of about thirty feet beneath that of the Baltic. Were there a
trench-like strip of country that communicated between the Caspian and
the Gulf of Finland to be depressed beneath the level of the latter sea,
it would _so open up the fountains of the great deep_ as to lay under
water an extensive and populous region, containing the cities of
Astracan and Astrabad, and many o