e exempt. It has become necessary to show
that the Noachian cataclysm was strangely selective, in burying in the
beds which it is held by the class to have formed, now one group of
plants and animals, now quite another group, and anon yet another and
different group still; and all this many times repeated with such nice
care and discrimination, that not a single organism of the lower beds is
to be detected in the middle ones, nor yet a single organism of either
the middle or lower in the beds that lie above. Even this task, however,
just a little lightened by here and there a suppression of the facts,
has been attempted by the redoubtable Dean of York.[38] Fire and water
were, he conceives, equally agents in the great catastrophe that
destroyed the old world,--a circumstance which, if true, would have
furnished with an admirable apology the class of persons who, according
to the wit, would have cried out "Fire, fire," at the deluge. The dean
conceives that at the commencement of the Flood, when torrents of rain
were falling upon the land, numerous submarine volcanoes began to
disgorge their molten contents into the sea, destroying the fish, and
all other marine productions, by the intensity of the heat, and at the
same time locking them up in strata formed of the erupted matter. This
process took place ere the land floods, laden with the spoils of island
and continent, and the accompanying mud and sand, could arrive at the
remoter depths; which, however, they ultimately reached, and formed a
second formation, overlying the first. There were thus two formations
originated,--a marine formation below, and a terrestrial or fresh water
formation above; but as these two deposits could not be made to include
all the geological phenomena with which even the dean was acquainted, he
had nicely to parcel out the work of his volcanoes on the one hand, and
that of his land floods on the other, into separate fits or paroxysms,
each of which served to entomb a distinct class of creatures, and
originate a definite set of rocks. Thus, the first work of his volcanoes
was to form the Transition series of strata. As a commencement of the
whole, the internal fire blew up from the bed of the ocean, in
tremendous explosions, vast quantities of pulverized rock mixed with
clay, which, slowly subsiding, and covering up, as it sank, shells,
stone-lilies, and trilobites, formed the Silurian rocks. A second
explosion brought up the vents of the volca