[2117] Homily VI, 10.
[2118] V, 2.
[2119] V, 7. But perhaps he simply means that oaks will grow where pines used to.
Tertullian, De pallio, cap. 2, dwelling on the law of change, speaks of the washing down of soil from mountains, the alluvial formation by rivers, and of sea-shells on mountain tops as a proof that the whole earth was once covered by water. He seems to have in mind a gradual process of geological evolution rather than Noah’s flood, and Sir James Frazer states that Isidore of Seville is the first he knows of the many writers who have appealed “to fossil shells imbedded in remote mountains as witnesses to the truth of the Noachian tradition,”—Origines, XIII, 22, cited by J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918), I, 159, who cites the passage in Tertullian at pp. 338-9.
[2120] Homily IX, 2.
[2121] Cunningham, Christian Opinion on Usury, p. 9.
[2122] Twice in the course of the Panarion (Dindorf, I, 280, and II, 428; Petavius, 2D and 404A) he gives the year of the reign of Valentinian and Valens, namely, the eleventh and the twelfth.
[2123] Lucian’s De dipsadibus will be recalled; see also Pliny, NH, XXIII, 80; Lucan, Pharsalia, IX, 719.
[2124] Pliny, NH, XXIII, 18; XXX, 10.
[2125] Pliny, NH, XXV, 53; XXI, 92; XIX, 62; XII, 40 and 55.