LECTURE EIGHTH.
THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.
PART II.
A century has not yet gone by since all the organic remains on which the science of Palæontology is now founded were regarded as the wrecks of a universal deluge, and held good in evidence that the waters had prevailed in every known country, and risen over the highest hills. Intelligent observers were not wanting at even an earlier time who maintained that a temporary flood could not have occasioned phenomena so extraordinary. Such was the view taken by several Italian naturalists of the seventeenth century, and in Britain by the distinguished mathematician Hooke, the contemporary, and in some matters rival, of Newton. But the conclusions of these observers, now so generally adopted, were regarded both in Popish and Protestant countries as but little friendly to Revelation; and so strong was the opposite opinion, and so generally were petrifactions regarded as so many proofs of a universal deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, first in his Dissertation drawn up for the Academy at Bologna, and next in his article on shells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up the question as charged with one of the evidences of that Revelation which it was the great design of his life to subvert. And with an unfairness too characteristic of his sparkling but unsolid writings, we find him arguing, that all fossil shells were either those of fresh water lakes and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or of land snails developed in unusual abundance during wet ones; or that they were shells which had been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land to their homes; or that they were shells that had gone astray from cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not shells at all, but mere shell-like forms, produced by some occult process of nature in the bowels of the earth. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in his attempts to neutralize that Palæontologic evidence on which geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a reaction against the special school of infidelity which he had founded, that at length bore it down. He wrote in the middle of the Paris basin, with its multitude of fossil shells and bones; and, when penning his article for the Encyclopædia, he had, he tells us, a boxful of the shell-charged soil of the Faluns of Touraine actually before him; but the deluge had to be put down, whatever the nature or bearing of the facts; and so he could find in either no evidence of a time when the sea had covered the land. He found, instead, only "some mussels, because there were ponds in the neighborhood." As for the "spiral petrifactions termed cornu ammonis," of which the Jurassic Alps are full, they were not nautili, he said; they could be nothing else than reptiles; seeing that reptiles take almost always the form of a spiral when not in motion; and it was surely more likely, that when petrified they should still retain the spiral disposition, than that "the Indian Ocean should have long ago overflowed the mountains of Europe." Were there not, however, real shells of the Syrian type in France and Italy? Perhaps so. But ought "we not to recollect," he asked, "the numberless bands of pilgrims who carried their money to the Holy Land, and brought back shells? or was it preferable to think that the sea of Joppa and Sidon had covered Burgundy and Milanais?" As for the seeming shells of the less superficial deposits, "Are we sure," he inquired, "that the soil of the earth cannot produce fossils?" Agate in some specimens contains its apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner, produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake or river petrifactions?—one never sees among them "true marine substances"!! "If there were any, why have we never seen bones of sea dogs, sharks, and whales?"!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief apparently that he had to deal with but an ignorant priesthood, too little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in behalf of the Mosaic narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail him, he could vanquish with a joke.
There was, however, a young German, who had not at the time quite made up his mind either for the French school or against it, who was no uninterested reader of Voltaire's disquisitions on fossil shells. And this young man was destined to be in the coming age what the Frenchman had been in the closing one,—the leading mind of Europe. He, too, had been looking at fossils; and having no case to make out either for or against Moses, or any one else, he had received in a fair and candid spirit the evidence with which they were charged. And the gross dishonesty of Voltaire in the matter formed so decided a turning point with him, that from that time forward he employed his great influence in bearing down the French school of infidelity, as a school detestably false and hollow;—a warning, surely, to all, whether they stand up for Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, like the witty Frenchman, "wicked overmuch." "To us youths," says Goethe, in his Autobiography, "with our German love of truth and nature, the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects, became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in our aversion from him. He could never have done with degrading religion and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now learned, that to weaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all petrified shells, and only admitted them as lusus naturæ, he entirely lost my confidence; for my own eyes had on the Baschberg plainly enough shown me that I stood on the bottom of an old dried-up sea, among the exuviæ of its ancient inhabitants. These mountains had certainly been once covered with waves,—whether before or during the Deluge did not concern me: it was enough that the valley of the Rhine had been a monstrous lake,—a bay extending beyond the reach of eyesight: out of this I was not to be talked. I thought much more of advancing in the knowledge of lands and mountains, let what would be the result." I know not in the whole history of opinion a more instructive passage than this. Little could Voltaire have known what he was in reality doing, or how egregiously he was overreaching himself, when, in laboring to bear down the evidence borne by fossils to the ancient upheavals and cataclysms, he suffered himself to make use of assertions and arguments so palpably unfair. And those who employ, in their zeal against the geologists, what is still exceedingly common,—the Voltairean style of argument,—especially if they employ it in what they deem the behalf of religion, might do well to inquire whether they are not in some little danger of producing the Voltairean result.
No man acquainted with the general outlines of Palæontology, or the true succession of the sedimentary formations, has been able to believe, during the last half century, that any proof of a general deluge can be derived from the older geologic systems,—Palæozoic, Secondary, or Tertiary. It has been held, however, by accomplished geologists, within even the last thirty years, that such proof might be successfully sought for in what are known as the superficial deposits. Such was the belief of Cuvier,—a man who, even in geologic science, which was certainly not his peculiar province, exerted a mighty influence over the thinking of other men. "I agree with MM. Deluc and Dolomieu in thinking," we find him saying, in his widely famed "Theory of the Earth," "that if anything in geology be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of which cannot be referred to a much earlier period than five or six thousand years ago." But from the same celebrated work we learn that Cuvier held that this sudden catastrophe,—occasioned, as he supposed, by an elevation of the sea bottom and a submergence of the previously existing land,—had not been universal; seeing he could entertain the belief that the three great races of the human family,—Ethiopian, Mongolian, and Caucasian,—had all escaped from it in several directions. In referring to the marked peculiarities of the Mongolian race, so very distinct from the Caucasian, he merely intimates, that he was "tempted to believe their ancestors and ours had escaped the great catastrophe on different sides;" but in dwelling on the still more marked peculiarities of the Negroes, we find him explicitly stating, that, "all their characters clearly show that they had escaped from the overwhelming deluge at another point than the Caucasian and Altaic races; from which they had perhaps been separated," he adds, "for a long time previous to the occurrence of that event." For a season, geologists of high standing in our own country, such as Buckland and Conybeare, followed Cuvier so far as to hold, that the superficial deposits bore evidence everywhere of a great cataclysm, the last of the geologic catastrophes; and which might be identified, they believed, with the Noachian Deluge. Against this view one of the most distinguished of Scottish naturalists, Dr. John Fleming, raised a vigorous protest as early as the year 1826, and conclusively showed that no temporary flood could have produced the existing appearances. And so thoroughly were his facts and reasonings confirmed by subsequent discovery, that the geologists of name who had acquiesced, wholly or in part, in the Cuvierian view, read in succession their recantations: Dr. Buckland in especial, who had written most largely on the subject, and committed himself most thoroughly, did so a very few years after: nor does the hypothesis of Cuvier appear to have been since adopted by any writer of scientific reputation. Instead, therefore, of contending with arguments or inferences which there are now no parties in the field to maintain, I shall briefly refer to a few of the leading characteristics of those superficial deposits on which the abandoned conclusions were originally based, and show, in the passing, that they are not such as a temporary deluge could have produced.
The superficial deposits include what is known as the mammaliferous crag, the drift, the boulder and brick clays, the stratified sands and gravels, the travelled rocks, the ösars, and moraines of the higher latitudes. For it is a fact very significant in its bearings on the diluvial controversy, that it is in the higher latitudes in both hemispheres that these peculiar deposits are chiefly to be found. They have been traced in Patagonia in the one hemisphere, from the southern limits of the country to the forty-first degree of south latitude; and in Europe in the other, to the fortieth; and in America to even the thirty-eighth degree of north latitude. But in the great belt, nearly eighty degrees in breadth, which, encircling the globe from east to west, includes with the torrid the warmer portions of the temperate zones, they have scarce any existence at all, or exist at least in different forms and exceedingly reduced proportions. The superficial deposits, in their most characteristic conditions, are deposits of the colder portions of the globe, and in many parts indicate that there prevailed during their formation a much severer climate than now obtains in the regions in which they occur. The shells which they contain in Britain, for instance, though almost all of existing species, are many of them such as are not now to be found in the British seas, but in seas about ten degrees further to the north; and there is evidence that the line of perpetual snow must have descended at the time to a lower level than that attained by our second-class hills, and that almost every Highland valley had its glacier. They represent, too, vast periods of time;—earlier periods, during which the land gradually sank, till only its higher eminences were uncovered, and great floats of icebergs went careering over its submerged plains and lower hills; and later periods, during which the land as gradually arose, after apparently many pauses and oscillations, until at length, when it had reached a level scarce eighty feet higher than that which it at present maintains, the climate softened, and the glaciers which had formed in the later times among its hills ultimately disappeared. Beds of sea-shells of the boreal type, that belong to those ice ages, may be still found occupying the places in which they had lived and died, many miles inland, and hundreds of feet over the sea level. Boring shells, such as the pholodadidæ, may be detected far out of sight of the ocean, still occupying the cells which they had scooped out for themselves in hard limestone or yielding shale; and serpula and nuliporate encrustations may be seen still adhering to rocks raised to giddy elevations over the sea. The group of mammals, however, which lived during this period, and to whose abundant tusks and skeletons one of its older deposits (the mammaliferous crag) owes its name, was marked by so peculiar a character, that evidence of a universal deluge has been often sought for in their remains. The group,—that which immediately preceded the animals of our own times, and included not a few of the indigenous species which still inhabit our country,—was chiefly remarkable for containing many genera, all of whose existing species are exotic. It had its great elephant, its two species of rhinoceros, its hippopotamus, its hyæna, its tiger, and its monkey; and much ingenious calculation has been employed by writers such as Granville Penn, in attempting to show how these remains might have been transported from the intertropical regions during the Flood, not only to Britain, but even to the northern wastes of Siberia,—a voyage of from four to five thousand miles. There are instances on record in which the bodies of the drowned have been drifted from ninety to a hundred and fifty miles from the spot where they had been first submerged; but they have always been found, in these cases, in a condition of sad mutilation and decay; whereas the carcass of the ancient elephant which was discovered, a little ere the commencement of the present century, locked up in ice in Siberia, three thousand six hundred miles from where elephants now live, was in such a state of excellent keeping, that the bears and dogs fed upon its flesh. It seems a significant circumstance too, that the remains of these fossil elephants, tigers, and hyænas, should be associated in even our own country with those of well known northern species,—with the remains of the reindeer, of the red deer, of the Lithuanian auroch, of the European beaver, of the European wolf, of the wild cat, the fox, and the otter. Writers, however, such as Mr. Penn, got over both difficulties. He showed, for instance, how a ship had once run across the Atlantic under bare poles, during an almost continued hurricane, at the rate of two hundred and eighty-eight miles in twenty-four hours,—nearly the rate at which the great American steamers cross the same ocean now; and why, he asked, might not the carcasses of elephants have drifted northwards at an equal rate on the tides of the deluge? And as for the mixed character of the group with which these remains are found associated, that was exactly what Mr. Penn would have expected in the circumstances. It was the result of a tumultuary flood, which had brought together in our northern region the floating carcasses of the animals of all climates, to sink in unwonted companionship, when putrefaction had done its work, into the same deposits. He had, however, unluckily overlooked the fact, that comparative anatomy is in reality a science; and further, that it is a science of which men such as Cuvier and Owen know a great deal more than the men who never studied it, however respectable. It is the recorded decision of these great anatomists,—a decision which has been many times tested and confirmed,—that the northern species of elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and hyæna, were entirely different from the intertropical species; that they differed from them very considerably more than the ass differs from the horse, or the dog from the wolf; and that, while there is a preponderating amount of evidence to show that they were natives of the countries in which their remains are now found, there is not a shadow of evidence to show that they had ever lived, or could have lived, in an intertropical country. Of the northern elephant, it is positively known, from the Siberian specimen, that it was covered, like many other sub-arctic animals, with long hair, and a thick crisp undergrowth of wool, about three inches in length,—certainly not an intertropical provision; and so entirely different was it in form from either of the existing species, African or Indian, that a child could be taught in a single lesson to distinguish it by the tusks alone. In fine, the assumption that challenges the remains of the old Pleistocene carnivora and pachydermata as those of intertropical species brought northwards by a universal deluge, is about as well based and sound as if it challenged the bones of foxes occasionally found in our woods for the remains of dogs of Aleppo or Askalon brought into Britain by the Crusaders, or as if it pronounced a dead ass to be one of the cavalry horses of the fatal charge of Balaklava, transported to England from the Crimea as a relic of the fight. The hypothesis confounds as a species the Rosinante of Quixote with the Dapple of Sancho Panza, and frames its argument on the mistake.
That this extinct group of animals inhabited for ages the countries in which their remains are now embedded, is rendered evident by their great numbers in some localities, and from their occurrence in various states of preservation, and in beds of various ages. The five hundred mammoths whose tusks and grinders were dragged up in thirteen years by the oyster dredgers of the Norfolk coast from a tract of submerged drift, could not all have been contemporary in a small corner of England, but must have represented several generations. And of course the two thousand grinders brought up from the exposed surface of the drift must have borne but a small proportion to the thousands still dispersed throughout the entire depth of the deposit. Any argument, however, founded on the mere numbers of these elephantine tusks and grinders, and which evaded the important question of species, might be eluded, however unfairly, by the assertors of a universal deluge. Floods certainly do at times accumulate, in great heaps, bodies of the same specific gravity; and why might not a universal flood have accumulated on this special tract of drift, the carcasses of many elephants? But it will be found greatly more difficult to elude the ingenious argument on the general question of Professor Owen. Next, perhaps, to the extinct elephant, one of the most numerous animals of this ancient group was the great Irish elk, Megaceros Hibernicus, a creature that, measured to the top of its enormous antlers, stood ten feet four inches in height, and exceeded in bulk and size the largest horses. Like all other species of the deer family, the creature annually shed and renewed its horns; "and a male deer may be reckoned," says Professor Owen, "to have left about eight pairs of antlers, besides its bones, to testify its former existence upon the earth. But as the female has usually no antlers, our expectations might be limited to the discovery of four times as many pairs of antlers as skeletons in the superficial deposits of the countries in which such deer have lived and died. The actual proportion of the fossil antlers of the great extinct species of British Pliocene deer (which antlers are proved by the form of their base to have been shed by the living animals) to the fossil bones of the same species, is somewhat greater than in the above calculation. Although, therefore, it may be contended that the swollen carcass of a drowned exotic deer might be borne along a diluvial wave to a considerable distance, and its bones ultimately deposited far from its native soil, it is not credible that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried by the same cause to the same distance; or that any of them could be rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the fractured specimens are generally found in caves, and show marks of the teeth of the ossivorous hyænas by which they had been gnawed; thus at the same time revealing the mode in which they were introduced into those caves, and proving the contemporaneous existence in this island of both kinds of mammalia."
