nct, such as leads the swallow to take its distant flight at the
approach of winter, they came from all parts of the globe to the ark of
safety."

It is true that one account does say that they came in unto Noah, for
there are two very different stories of the deluge mixed up in those
chapters of Genesis; but, although flying birds might perform such a
feat as going twelve thousand miles to the ark, which would be necessary
for some, how could other animals get there? It would be impossible even
for some birds. How could the ostriches of Africa, the emus of
Australia, and the rheas of South America, get there,--birds that never
fly? There are three species of the rhea, or South-American ostrich; and
forty-two of these would have a journey of eight thousand miles before
them, by the shortest route: but how could they cross the Atlantic? If
they went by land, they must have traversed the length of the American
continent, from Patagonia to Alaska, crossed at Behring's Strait when it
was frozen, and then travelled diagonally across nearly the whole
continent of Asia to Armenia, after a journey that must have required
many months for its completion. The sloths, that have been confined to
South America ever since the pliocene period at least, must have taken
the same route. How they crossed the mountain streams, and lived when
passing over broad prairies, it would be difficult to say. A mile a day
would be a rapid rate for these slow travellers, and it would therefore
require about forty years for them to arrive at their destination. But,
since the life of a sloth is not as long as this, they must have
bequeathed their journey to their posterity, and they to their
descendants, born on the way, who must have reached the ark before the
door was closed. The land-snails must have met with still greater
difficulties. Impelled by most wonderful instinct, they commenced their
journey full a thousand years before the time; and their posterity of
the five hundredth generation must have made their appearance, and been
provided with a passage by the venerable Noah.

Scott, who wrote a commentary on the Bible seventy or eighty years ago,
must have seen some of these difficulties, though with nothing like the
clearness with which science enables us to see them now. He says, "There
must have been a very extraordinary miracle wrought, perhaps by the
ministration of angels, in bringing two of every species to Noah, and
rendering them submis