down into the hollow interior,
like patches of broken plaster dangling from a ceiling, suspended by the
hairs originally employed to give the necessary tenacity to the lime.
The great granitic shell was also broken, but broken so nicely, on the
principle of the arch, that the pieces remained in nearly their original
places. Finally, vast rents are seen to occur in the cement and soil of
the outer crust; and these great rents, which must have formed enormous
gulfs and deep interminable ravines, were destined, it would seem, to
perform a most important part in the future geology of the globe.
Forming impassable lines of demarcation between the several portions
into which they broke up the earth's surface, they imprisoned the
recently created animals in separate groups, kept as completely from
mixing together as the fallow-deer of one loftily-walled park are kept
from mixing with the white oxen of another loftily-walled park, or as
the kangaroos or duck-billed quadrupeds of Australia are kept by the
surrounding ocean from mixing with the tigers of Sumatra or the
tortoises of Madagascar. I employ the writer's own happy
illustration:--"In some places these fragments" of the earth's crust
"would be piled more or less above each other, and in others quite
detached and isolated, like fragments of ice on the bank of a river
after a thaw." They would of course be on very different levels, each
having, as I have said, a distinct group of animals of its own; and
when, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, the great
catastrophe of the Flood came on, it would necessarily find, as it rose
along the levels, and submerged platform after platform in succession, a
different and yet different set of creatures to kill. To borrow from the
description of this ingenious cosmogonist, "those on the lower fragments
would be first engulphed, and their races completely extinguished from
off the surface, and deposited in the earth; then those on higher and
higher upwards, till the whole became submerged. And we have only to
suppose that man, with the present survivors, were those that occupied
one of the higher table-lands when the Flood commenced (and of course in
that case Noah could collect into the ark only out of those of his own
country); then the result would be, that man and his present
contemporaries would be among the last overwhelmed. This will
sufficiently account for the fact of his and their remains not being
found deep in the