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as well as the remains of terrestrial animals: they are found, too, in situations where, as at Monte Bolca, it is inconceivable that they can have been wafted from the neighbourhood of the line. The only admissible inference is that the climate has undergone a change since the antediluvian period.

To account for this change may be difficult; but having established the body of evidence above stated, the fact of the change may be admitted without difficulty. Ingenious men may indulge in conjectures as to the physical cause, such as a change in the direction of the earth's axis, or any other planetary disturbance; but this, after all, will be conjecture only, not philosophy; and Mr. Buckland has wisely forborne to entangle himself with such questions. We will only observe, that nothing is more likely than that the stupendous revolution then wrought on our globe should have been accompanied by some permanent change in its atmosphere; and the mention of the rainbow in scripture, as a novel phenomenon after the deluge, clearly implies that some meteorological change then took place, although we may be wholly incompetent to explain what it was or how it was produced. De Luc's hypothesis, in his sixth Letter to Blumenbach, in which he supposes that tempestuous rains are among the consequences of that change, is the most pleasing and plausible that has yet been advanced; but it is hardly entitled to a place in a scientific work.

The following sections of this second part treat of the evidence afforded by deposits of loam and gravel without reference to their animal contents, and by blocks of granite and pebbles of various kinds, drifted from their parent rocks. Beds of this description are totally distinct from those local and partial formations, now going on from day to day, of deltas, terraces, tufas, torrent-gravel and peat-bogs; and Mr. Buckland justly remarks on the importance of appropriating the term alluvial to the latter class, and of speaking of the former always under the appellation diluvium.

Nothing can be more decisive than the evidence collected under this head from various parts of England, Scotland, Ireland, the continent of Europe, and even from North America, Africa and Asia. The diluvial gravel is almost always of a compound character, containing amongst the detritus of each immediate neighbourhood, (which usually forms its greatest bulk,) rolled fragments of rocks, whose native bed is often at a great distance, and which must have been drifted thence at the time of the formation of the gravel, in which they are at present lodged. The position of the parent mountain, with respect to the fragments, is important, as affording a proof of the direction of the currents that drifted them to their present place of lodgment.

Our notice of these chapters, curious and interesting as they

are,

are, must necessarily be brief. Suffice it to say, that the currents which have strewed the surface of England and the continent of Europe with the wreck of distant masses, appear to have set generally from the north; and that these scattered fragments clearly indicate that the chalk strata, as well as other formations, once extended much farther north than they at present do; having been swept en masse before the mighty currents which tore them from their former position. In the Appendix, a detailed account is given, accompanied with a map, of the gravel of the valley of the Thames, charged as it is with pebbles brought from the Lickey Hill near Birmingham. This curious memoir will, we trust, serve as a model to many similar investigations, by which our local histories and topographical memoirs may hereafter be enriched.

This part of the work concludes with a chapter, which, in a religious point of view, is the most important of the whole work, viz. proofs of inundation at the highest levels of the globe. It was before observed, that Cuvier left this point open to the belief, that various portions of the human race might have escaped to the mountains, and there survived the general devastation. Mr. Buckland brings together decisive proofs, that the highest summits were covered with water. The granite blocks on Mount Jura, transported from the summit of Mont Blanc, the form of the Alps and Carpathians, and other mountainous regions of Europe, which he has visited, all bearing the same evidence of having been modified by the force of water, as do the hills of the lower regions, and the lodgment of diluvial gravel in their plains and vallies,all attest this fact. Nay, the bones of extinct animals, although not yet discovered in the Alpine gravel beds, have been found in America, at an elevation of 7,800 feet, and by Humboldt in the Cordilleras, at 7,200 feet above the level of the sea. In central Asia, the evidence is still more decisive. Captain W. S. Webb, an officer of high character in the East India service, and a man of science, who was employed many years in a survey of the Himalayan Mountains, procured fossil bones from an elevation of more than 16,000 feet. They were sent home last year to Sir E. Home, and prove to be those of a small species of horse and of deer. To this we may add, that others of the bear species have been found in the same spot. It is an elevated plain, surrounded by snowy peaks, the highest of which are at least 26,000 feet. The plain itself is cultivated and inhabited, and is that in which the great river Sutlej has its source. Being just within the borders of Chinese Tartary, Captain Webb was not permitted by that jealous government to pass the boundary; but his geometrical observations fix the altitude with the greatest certainty;

and

and the bones were procured from the inhabitants of the district, who call them the bones of genii, and think that they fell from the clouds. There is no ground to suspect that they are brought from a lower region by the natives, for they are not valued or sold, or used for any purpose, and the natives wondered at Captain Webb's desire to possess them. The first specimens were brought by a man in his employment, who had failed in obtaining the object of inquiry, viz. some supposed works of Grecian art, of which Captain Webb had heard, and who, in default of these, brought abundance of the fossil called Ammonite, upon which the Hindoos set a superstitious value. These fragments of bone also he produced, as being something curious found in the gravel at the base of those eminences from which the ammonites are procured; and which, although frequently noticed, never appear to have been made the objects of search, and are not preserved, as the ammonites and similar fossils are, from a superstitious motive. These are additional facts, which we have ourselves had the means of ascertaining since the publication of Mr. Buckland's work; and they surely leave us no pretence for doubting what the scripture records, that all the high hills and mountains under the whole heavens were covered,' at the time when the last great physical change took place, by an inundation of water over the whole surface of the earth.

The third head of evidence relates to the Vallies of Denudation. It is thrown into the Appendix, having been partially anticipated in the preceding discussions, and having been already published in the Geological Transactions. To the force of a body of water like the ocean, pouring in over the land, or rushing from a higher level, no limits can be assigned. The professor demonstrates its agency in the excavation of valleys in several parts of England, drawing his examples chiefly from his native district, on the southern coast, that between Lyme and Exmouth, where they abound in a remarkable degree, and form the characteristic feature of the country. But we must put an end to abstracts and quotations, having still much to say upon the general principles of this inquiry, and its connexion with the important question of revealed religion.

Before, however, we enter upon this consideration, it may be well to take a brief review of the points which Mr. Buckland has been the first to establish in geological science; for a single step, well secured, which advances us beyond the former boundary of real knowledge, is worth a whole budget of theories, however grand, ingenious or original.

In the first place then, he has refuted the favourite notion of De Luc, which was adopted even by Cuvier, and seems to have been

the

the prevailing belief of the present day, that the sea and land changed places at the deluge, the former continents sinking into vast subterraneous caverns, the roof of which gave way on that sudden convulsion. Great as the changes certainly were, that were caused by that catastrophe, and deeply as its ravages are sculptured on the surface of the globe, excavating vallies, and forcing passages for water through the margin of lakes, and the sides even of mountain ranges, yet it is clearly proved that the same lands which are now inhabited were, before that event, also uncovered by the waters; and although the parts hitherto examined, appear not to have been occupied by man, yet they were the abode of numerous tribes of land animals, whose remains are identified with the greatest certainty and precision.

In the next place it is proved, for the first time, by means of the phenomena of the Kirkdale cave, that these remains were not drifted from remote climates to the places in which they are found; but that the animals to which they belonged, lived in the neighbourhood, and were the ordinary inhabitants of these regions of the earth.

Thirdly, it is Mr. Buckland who has first presented us with a distinct and detailed view of a state of animal life previous to the deluge. Hitherto this epoch had presented an impassable barrier to all the researches of naturalists. We saw, indeed, evidences of the destruction of organized beings, dispersed throughout the interior of the crust of the earth, as well as largely scattered over its surface. But it was a confused and indiscriminate scene of death which met our eyes. All that we could infer was, that the animals perished. Their habits, their instincts, their food, their mode of life, were all involved in utter, and, as it would seem, in hopeless uncertainty. The veil, however, which before concealed that antediluvian world from our eyes, has now been lifted, and a spectacle opened to our view, which has at once enlarged the range of our physical knowledge, and leads the imagination, freed as it were from its former shackles, to roam with delight over a field hitherto covered with impenetrable mystery. It is, in short, one of those cheering facts which encourage us to hope, that through the progressive improvement of the several arts and sciences, no bounds are set to the possible discoveries of the human mind, when its powers are well disciplined and rightly directed. How much, indeed, this very discovery is owing to the late improvements in comparative anatomy, the memoir on the Kirkdale cave plainly proves. The Tartars suppose the diluvian bones they find to be the bones of genii: our ancestors called the large ones those of giants: we now ascertain with precision, not only the component parts of elephants, horses, oxen, deer, but we speak

with confident familiarity of the teeth of water-rats,' 'the left ulua of a lark,' or the 'coracoid process of the right scapula of a duck,' that was eaten before the deluge. To Cuvier the world is indebted more than to all other naturalists put together, for our advancement in this branch of knowledge: and it is pleasing to observe, that he has made, in his last publications, the most flattering acknowledgments of Mr. Buckland's merits, even in many points where he had himself formerly held opposite opinions.*

But it is in the collection of this vast body of evidence, attesting the greatest physical epoch in the history of mankind, in its masterly arrangement, in the unravelling of intricate questions, in the candid examination of objections, in the solution of difficulties and anomalies, in the perspicuous and exact descriptions, and, above all, in discerning the relation which subsists between scattered phenomena, and in the close inductive logic which is brought to bear upon the facts as they arise, that we trace the action of a mind destined, we hope, to make still larger additions to the stock of human knowledge. Certainly we may pronounce the author to be the first who has placed this fact beyond the reach of controversy or cavil, and to have put the finishing hand to an argument so long laboured at by our divines, that the earth, after having been inhabited for ages, was, at the period recorded in the sacred history, covered, even to its highest summits, by a sudden, simultaneous, universal, transient flood of waters.

We have already observed that when once a fact is thus established, although it may be difficult, or even impossible, to assign its physical causes, yet our inability to account for it throws no difficulty whatever in the way of our believing it. However philosophical it may be to make this attempt, it is a most unphilosophical confusion of thought to suffer the difficulty of discovering a cause to affect our belief in a fact demonstratively proved. We have no objection indeed to the endeavours which ingenious men have made to discover in the system of nature some means by which this extraordinary effect might have been produced; nor do we regard them as necessarily indicative of a disbelief in the divine interference, because even miraculous agency is often, nay generally, combined with natural means; and even if some physical agent should hereafter be suggested, adequate to such a phenomenon, we should be far from thinking that our own belief in the positive agency of the Divine Being was thereby disproved. But if the whole case be carefully and impartially exa

See the extracts from Cuvier's fourth volume of his Ossemens Fossiles, edit. 2d. given in the Postscript to Professor Buckland's book, p. 229.

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