Think of a troop of angels fly-catching, snail-seeking, and bug-hunting through all lands, lugging through the air, horses, giraffes, elephants, and rhinoceroses, and dropping them at the door of the ark. One has crossed the Atlantic with rattlesnakes, copperheads, and boas twined around him, almost crippling his wings with their snaky folds; and another with a brace of skunks, one under each wing, that the renewed world may not lack the fragrance of the old. What a subject for the pencil of a Raphael or Doré! Had the "hardened spectators" beheld such a scene as this, Noah and his cargo would have been cast out of the ark, and the sinners themselves, converted by this stupendous miracle, would have taken passage therein.
Not only must there have been a succession of most stupendous miracles to get the animals to the ark, but also to return them to their proper places of abode. But few of them could have lived in the neighborhood of Ararat, had they been left there. How could the polar bear return to his home among the ice-bergs, the sloths to the congenial forests of the New World, and all the mammals, reptiles, insects, and snails to their respective habitats, the homes of their ancestors for ages innumerable? To return them was just as necessary as to obtain them, and, though less difficult, was equally impossible.
How could eight persons, all that were saved in the ark, attend to all these animals! Nearly all would require food and water once a day, and many twice. In a menagerie, one man takes care of four cages,—feeds, cleans, and waters the animals. In the ark, each person, women included, must have attended each day to ten thousand nine hundred and sixty-four birds, seven hundred and sixty-six beasts, one hundred and fourteen reptiles, one thousand one hundred and fifty land-snails, and one hundred and eighty-seven thousand five hundred insects.
Few persons have an idea of the difficulty of keeping even the common birds of a temperate climate alive in confinement for any length of time. Food that is quite suitable in a wild state may be fatal to them when they are kept in the house. Linnets feed on winter rape-seed in the wild state, but soon die if fed upon it in-doors. "They are to be fed," says Bechstein, "on summer rape-seed, moistened in water; and their food must be varied by the addition of millet, radish, cabbage, lettuce and plantain-seeds, and sometimes a few bruised melon-seeds or barberries." Nightingales, he says, should be fed on meal, worms, and fresh ants' eggs: but, if it is not possible to get these, a mixture of hard egg, ox-heart minced, and white bread may be given; but this often kills the birds. No such food would do for Noah's nightingales, then, or where would have been the nightingale's song? They must have been fed on meal, worms, and fresh ant's eggs. How they were obtained, we have, of course, no knowledge. Bechstein says that larks may be fed with "a paste made of grated carrot, white bread soaked in water, and barley or wheat meal, all worked together in a mortar. In addition to this paste, larks should be supplied with poppy-seed, bruised hemp, crumb of bread, and plenty of greens, such as lettuce, endive, cabbage, with a little lean meat or ant-eggs occasionally." He says the cage should be furnished with a piece of fresh turf, often renewed, and great attention should be paid to cleanliness. The care of the birds in the ark probably fell to the women. As they had not read Bechstein, or any other author on bird-keeping,—and thousands of the birds must have been total strangers to them,—how did they know what diet to supply them with, and where could they get it, supposing they had time to supply them at all?
If the difficulty was great to keep the birds of a temperate climate, how much greater must it have been to keep tropical birds in a climate altogether unsuited to them? The two birds of paradise bought by Wallace were fed, he says, on rice, bananas, and cockroaches: of the last, he obtained several cans from a bake-house at Malta, and thus got his paradise birds, by good fortune, to England. But how many cans of cockroaches would be necessary for two hundred and fifty-two of such birds,—the number in the ark? and where were the bake-houses from which the supply might be obtained?
To keep this vast menagerie clean would have required a large corps of efficient workers, especially when we remember that there was but one door in each story, as some suppose; or one door to the whole ark, as the story seems to teach, and this door was closed; and but one window, and that apparently in the roof. The Augean stable, the cleansing of which was one of the labors of Hercules, can but faintly indicate what must have been the condition of the ark in less than a month, supposing the animals to subsist as long.
Whence came the water that covered the earth to the tops of the highest mountains? "All the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered," says the record. And to do this, it rained for forty days and forty nights. A fall of an inch of water in a day is considered a very heavy rain in Great Britain. The heaviest single rain recorded fell on the Khasia Hills in India, and amounted to thirty inches in twenty-four hours. If this deluging rain could have continued for forty days and nights, and had it fallen over the entire surface of the globe, the amount would only have been one hundred feet; which, instead of covering the mountains, would not have covered the hills. But, of course, such a rain is only possible for a very limited time, and on a small portion of the earth's surface.
Sir John Leslie, in "The Encyclopedia Britannica," says, "Supposing the vast canopy of air, by some sudden change of internal constitution, at once to discharge its whole watery store, this precipitate would form a sheet of scarcely five inches thick over the surface of the globe." But if the water that covered the earth above the tops of the highest mountains came by rain, it must have rained seven hundred feet a day for forty days! or there must have fallen each day, according to Sir John Leslie's estimate, more than fourteen hundred times as much water on the earth as the atmosphere contained!
But the writer says, "The fountains of the great deep were broken up." To the Jews, who supposed, with David, that God had founded the earth upon the seas, and established it upon the floods, this meant something; but, in the light of geology, we see that it only demonstrates the ignorance of the man who wrote and the people that believed the story.
Adam Clarke, commenting on this passage, says, "It appears that an immense quantity of water occupied the centre of the antediluvian earth; and, as this burst forth by the order of God, the circumambient strata must sink in order to fill up the vacuum occasioned by the elevated waters." If true, it would not have assisted in drowning the world one spoonful. For if the strata sank anywhere to fill the hollow previously occupied by the water, it would only make the mountains so much higher in comparison: hence it would require just that much extra water to cover them. In the light of geology, however, the notion is sufficiently absurd. A mile and a half deep, the earth's interior is hot enough to convert water into steam; there is, therefore, no chance for water to exist in its centre, or anywhere near it.