at any other
time, since the higher terrestrial animals came into existence, they
must have been destroyed from the whole face of it, as the Pentateuchal
account declares they were three several times (Genesis vii. 21, 22,
23), in language which cannot be made more emphatic, or more solemn,
than it is; and the present population must consist of the descendants
of emigrants from the ark. And, if that is the case, then, as has often
been pointed out, the sloths of the Brazilian forests, the kangaroos
of Australia, the great tortoises of the Galapagos islands, must have
respectively hobbled, hopped, and crawled over many thousand miles
of land and sea from "Ararat" to their present habitations. Thus, the
unquestionable facts of the geographical distribution of recent land
animals, alone, form an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance of the
assertion that the kinds of animals composing the present terrestrial
fauna have been, at any time, universally destroyed in the way described
in the Pentateuch.

It is upon this and other unimpeachable grounds that, as I ventured
to say some time ago, persons who are duly conversant with even
the elements of natural science decline to take the Noachian deluge
seriously; and that, as I also pointed out, candid theologians, who,
without special scientific knowledge, have appreciated the weight of
scientific arguments, have long since given it up. But, as Goethe has
remarked, there is nothing more terrible than energetic ignorance; [9]
and there are, even yet, very energetic people, who are neither candid,
nor clear-headed, nor theologians, still less properly instructed in the
elements of natural science, who make prodigious efforts to obscure the
effect of these plain truths, and to conceal their real surrender of
the historical character of Noah's deluge under cover of the smoke of a
great discharge of pseudoscientific artillery. They seem to imagine that
the proofs which abound in all parts of the world, of large oscillations
of the relative level of land and sea, combined with the probability
that, when the sea-level was rising, sudden incursions of the sea like
that which broke in over Holland and formed the Zuyder Zee, may have
often occurred, can be made to look like evidence that something that,
by courtesy, might be called a general Deluge has really taken place.
Their discursive energy drags misunderstood truth into their service;
and "the glacial epoch" is as sure to crop up a