n
truth? Even the American Indians have their Noah or Deucalion, like the
Indians, Babylonians, and Greeks.

It may be said that the long existence of ancient nations is attested by
their progress in astronomy. But this progress has been much
exaggerated. But what would this astronomy prove even if it were more
perfect? Have we calculated the progress which a science would make in
the bosom of nations which had no other? If among the multitude of
persons solely occupied with astronomy, even then, all that these people
knew might have been discovered in a few centuries, when only 300 years
intervened between Copernicus and Laplace.

Again, it has been pretended that the zodiacal figures on ancient
temples give proof of a remote antiquity; but the question is very
complicated, and there are as many opinions as writers, and certainly no
conclusions against the newness of continents and nations can be based
on such evidence. The zodiac itself has been considered a proof of
antiquity, but the arguments brought forward are undoubtedly unsound.

Even if these various astronomical proofs were as certain as they are
unconvincing, what conclusion could we draw against the great
catastrophe so indisputably demonstrated? We should only have the right
to conclude that astronomy was among the sciences preserved by those
persons whom the catastrophe spared.

In conclusion, if there be anything determined in geology, it is that
the surface of our globe has been subjected to a revolution within 5,000
years, and that this revolution buried the countries formerly inhabited
by man and modern animals, and left the bottom of the former sea dry as
a habitation for the few individuals it spared. Consequently, our
present human societies have arisen since this catastrophe.

But the countries now inhabited had been inhabited before, as fossils
show, by animals, if not by mankind, and had been overwhelmed by a
previous deluge; and, indeed, judging by the different orders of animal
fossils we find, they had perhaps undergone two or three irruptions of
the sea.

CHARLES DARWIN

The Origin of Species

Charles Robert Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, England, Feb. 12,
1809, of a family distinguished on both sides. Abandoning medicine
for natural history, he joined H.M.S. Beagle in 1831 on the five
years' voyage, which he described in "The Voyage of the Beagle,"
and to which he refers in the introduction to his ma