ormer periods. He was
confirmed in this opinion by the numerous salt springs and marshes in
the interior of Asia,--a phenomenon from which Pallas, in more recent
times, has drawn the same inference.

Von Hoff has suggested, with great probability, that the changes in the
level of the Caspian (some of which there is reason to believe have
happened within the historical era), and the geological appearances in
that district, indicating the desertion by that sea of its ancient bed,
had probably led Omar to his theory of a general subsidence. But
whatever may have been the proofs relied on, his system was declared
contradictory to certain passages in the Koran, and he was called upon
publicly to recant his errors; to avoid which persecution he went into
voluntary banishment from Samarkand.[34]

The cosmological opinions expressed in the Koran are few, and merely
introduced incidentally: so that it is not easy to understand how they
could have interfered so seriously with free discussion on the former
changes of the globe. The Prophet declares that the earth was created in
two days, and the mountains were then placed on it; and during these,
and two additional days, the inhabitants of the earth were formed; and
in two more the seven heavens.[35] There is no more detail of
circumstances; and the deluge, which is also mentioned, is discussed
with equal brevity. The waters are represented to have poured out of an
oven; a strange fable, said to be borrowed from the Persian Magi, who
represented them as issuing from the oven of an old woman.[36] All men
were drowned, save Noah and his family; and then God said, "O earth,
swallow up thy waters; and thou, O heaven, withhold thy rain;" and
immediately the waters abated.[37]

We may suppose Omar to have represented the desertion of the land by the
sea to have been gradual, and that his hypothesis required a greater
lapse of ages than was consistent with Moslem orthodoxy; for it is to be
inferred from the Koran, that man and this planet were created at the
same time; and although Mahomet did not limit expressly the antiquity of
the human race, yet he gave an implied sanction to the Mosaic
chronology, by the veneration expressed by him for the Hebrew
Patriarchs.[38]

A manuscript work, entitled the "Wonders of Nature," is preserved in
the Royal Library at Paris, by an Arabian writer, Mohammed Kazwini, who
flourished in the seventh century of the Hegira, or at the close of the
thirt