A voyage to South America must have been made to obtain tapirs, pumas, peccaries, sloths, ant-eaters, armadillos, fourteen each of the llama, alpaca, and vicuna, beside monkeys, birds, and insects innumerable. A vessel nearly as large as "The Great Eastern" must have been employed, or a number of smaller ones, to accommodate the collectors, the animals, and food for a voyage across the Atlantic. There must have been, at least, a thousand men, wandering through the woods of Brazil, along the valley of the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the La Plata; paddling up the streams, scaling the mountains, roaming over the pampas, climbing the tall trees, turning over every stone and log, and exploring every nook, to discover the snails, bugs, insects, worms, reptiles, and other animals indigenous to South America, from the Isthmus to Tierra-del-fuego.
There must have been obtained four elephants, for there are two species, the Asiatic and the Indian; fourteen rhinoceroses, one of which is found only in South Africa, another in the island of Java, and a third in Sumatra; two hippopotami, and possibly four, for some authorities say there are two species. Fourteen giraffes, since they are clean beasts, must have been caught and driven from Central Africa (many more, indeed, must have been caught, that the required number might reach the ark and be preserved); twenty-eight camels, two hundred and eighty oxen (for there are twenty species, and they are clean); and no less than thirteen hundred and eighty-six deer and antelope, of which there are ninety-nine species recognized: these to be collected in various parts of Europe, Asia, Northern and Southern Africa, and America.
New Zealand must have been visited to obtain its wingless birds; Mauritius for its dodo, then living; Australia for its marsupials and other peculiar animals; and every large island, and most of the small ones, to obtain those forms of life that are only to be found in each. From the island of Celebes, they must have taken the eighty species of birds that are confined to it, which would require them to catch, cage, feed, and convey eleven hundred and twenty specimens: a no small job of itself. Ten men that could accomplish that, and carry them safe to Armenia, would do all that men could do in ten years. From the Philippine Islands, the seventy-three species of hawks, parrots, and pigeons, peculiar to them; which would require, since fourteen of every kind of bird were to be taken into the ark, no less than one thousand and twenty-two specimens. From New Guinea, and the neighboring islands, two hundred and fifty-two of the magnificent birds of paradise, since there are eighteen species.
A faint idea of the difficulties encountered and overcome by Noah's agents may be gathered from what Wallace, in his recent work on the Malay Archipelago, informs us respecting these birds of paradise. "Five voyages to different parts of the district they inhabit, each occupying in its preparation and execution the larger part of a year, produced me only five species out of the fourteen known to exist in the New-Guinea district." If it took Wallace, with all the assistance that he had from various officials, five years to obtain five species, represented by dead birds, how long did it take Noah's agents to obtain eighteen species represented by two hundred and fifty-two live birds? Wallace could only obtain two alive, and for these he had to pay five hundred dollars.
If the antediluvian sinners were any thing like the modern ones, Noah must have been richer than the Rothschilds, or he never could have obtained their services; which he must have done, or it could never be truthfully said, "according to all that God commanded him, so did he."
The collection of the land-snails alone would be no small tax. Seventy-four are peculiar to Great Britain: hence there must have been a hundred and forty-eight snails collected from that island. Six hundred species are found in Southern Europe alone, and twelve hundred must have been collected from there; eighty in Sicily, ten in Corsica, two hundred and sixty-four in the Madeira Islands, a hundred and twenty in the Canary Islands, twenty-six in St. Helena, sixty-three in Southern Africa, eighty-eight in Madagascar, a hundred and twelve in Ceylon, a hundred in New Zealand, and others on every large and some of the small islands of the globe. The world must have been circumnavigated many times before the vessel of Magellan was built, and every island visited and ransacked ages before the time of Captain Cook. But it seems surprising, since these voyages must have been performed by the sinful antediluvians, that they did not save themselves in their ships when the flood came; for vessels that could perform such voyages would certainly have survived the flood more readily than the clumsy ark.
But was it really done? A thousand men in ten years, with all the appliances of modern art,—steamboats, railroads, canals, coaches, and express companies,—could not accomplish it in ten years; nor ten times the number of men keep all the animals alive in one spot for one year, if they were collected together.
"But," says the Christian, "Noah never did collect them: no intelligent person in this day ever supposes that he did." What then? "The Bible expressly declares that 'they went in unto Noah into the ark.' By instinct, 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 submissive to him and peaceable with each other; yet it seems not to have made any impression on the hardened spectators."