With regard to the St. Acheul beds — said to be the most ancient formation in which the productions of human hands have been found — they are confessedly older than the peat-beds, and the time required for the production of other peat-beds of equal thickness has been estimated at 7,000 years. The antiquity of the gravel-beds of St. Acheul may be estimated on two grounds:— i. General elevation above the level of the valley. 2. By estimating the animal-remains found in the gravel-beds, and not in the peat. The first question implies the denudation of the valley below the level of the gravel, or the elevation of the whole plateau. Each of these operations would involve an incalculable time, for want of data. In the second case, judging from the slow rate at which quadrupeds have disappeared in historic times, the extinct Mammoth and other great animals must have occupied many centuries in dying out, for the notion that they died out suddenly from sharp and sudden refrigeration, isnot generally admitted.

With regard to the three ages of stone, bronze, and iron, ISf. Morlot has based some calculations upon the condition of the delta of Tiniere, near Villeneuve, which lead him to assign to the oldest, or stone period, an age of 5,000 to 7,000 years, and to the bronze period from 3,000 to 4,000. We may, then, take leave of this subject with the avowal that, while admitting the probability that an immense lapse of time would be required for the operations described, we are, in a great measure, without reliable data for estimating its actual extent.

48o THE WORLD BEFORE THE DELUGE,

The opinion which places the creation of man on the banks of the Euphrates in Central Asia is confirmed by an event of the highest importance in the history of humanity, and by a crowd of concordant traditions, preserved by different races of men, all tending to confirm it. We speak of the Asiatic deluge. «?.

Fig. 200.— Mount Ararat.

The Asiatic deluge— of which sacred history has transmitted to us the itvf particulars we know— was the result of the upheaval of a part of the long chain of mountains which are a prolongation of the Caucasus. The earth opening by one of the fissures made in its crust in course of cooling, an eruption of volcanic matter escaped through the enormous crater so produced. Volumes of watery vapour or steam accompanied the lava discharged from the interior of the globe, which, being first dissipated in clouds and afterwards con-

densing, descended, in torrents of rain, and the plains were drowned with the volcanic mud. The inundation of the plains over an extensive radius was the immediate effect of this upheaval, and the formation of the volcanic cone of Mount Ararat, with the vast plateau on which it rests, altogether 17,323 feet above the sea, the permanent result. The event is graphically detailed in the seventh chapter of Genesis. 11. "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12. "And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights." • • * • •

"And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.
"And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. 19. "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that wei-e under the whole heaven, were covered. 20. " Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
"And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: 22. "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. 23. "And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive^ and they that were with him in the ark.
" And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days." All the particulars of the Biblical narrative here recited are only to be explained by the volcanic and muddy eruption which preceded the formation of mount Ararat. The waters which produced the inundation of these countries proceeded from a volcanic eruption accompanied by enormous volumes of vapour, which in due course became condensed and descended on the earth, inundating the extensive plains which now stretch away from the foot of Ararat. The

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expression, " the earth," or " all the earth " as it is translated in the Vulgate, which might be implied to mean the entire globe, is explained by Marcel de Serres, in a learned book entitled " La Cos-mogonie de Moise," and other philologists, as being an inaccurate translation. He has proved that the Hebrew word haarets, incorrectly translated "all the earth," is often used in the sense of region or country, and that, in this instance, Moses used it to express only the part of the globe which was then peopled, and not its entire surface. In the same manner " the mountaifis " (rendered " all the mountains " in the Vulgate), only implies all the mountains known to Moses. Similarly, M. Glaire, in the " Christomathie Hebraique," which he has placed at the end of his Grammar, quotes the passage in this sense: " The waters were so prodigiously increased, that the highest mountains of the vast horizon were covered by them;" thus restricting the mountains covered by the inundation to those bounded by the horizon. Nothing occurs, therefore, in the description given by Moses, to hinder us from seeing in the Asiatic deluge a means made use of by God to chastise and punish the human race, then in the infancy of its existence, and which had strayed from the path which he had marked out for it. It seems to establish the countries lying at the foot of the Caucasus as the cradle of the human race; and it seems to establish also the upheaval of a chain of mountains, preceded by an eruption of volcanic mud, which drowned vast territories entirely composed, in these regions, of plains of great extent. Of this deluge many races besides the Jews have preserved a tradition. Moses dates it from 1,500 to 1,800 years before the epoch in which he wrote. Berosus, the Chaldean historian, who wrote at Babylon in the time of Alexander, speaks of a universal deluge, the date of which he places immediately before the reign of Belus, the father of Ninus.

The Vedas, or sacred books of the Hindus, supposed to have been composed about the same time as Genesis, that is, about 3,300 years ago, make out that the deluge occurred 1,500 yeai-s before their time. The Guebers speak of the same event as having occurred about the same date.

Confucius, the celebrated Chinese philosopher and lawgiver, born towards the year 551 before Christ, begins his history of China by speaking of the Emperor named Jas, whom he represents as making the waters flow back, which, being raised to the heavens, washed the feet of the highest mountains, covered the less elevated hills, and inundated the plains. Thus the Biblical deluge (Plate XXXIII.) is confirmed in many respects; but it was local, like all phenomena of

XXXIII.—The Asiatic Deluge.

the kind, and was the result of the upheaval of the mountains of western Asia. A deluge, quite of modern date, conveys a tolerably exact idea of this kind of phenomena. We recall the circumstances the better to comprehend the true nature of the ravages the deluge inflicted upon some Asiatic countries in the Quaternary period. At six days' journey from the city of Mexico there existed, in 1759, a fertile and well-cultivated district, where grew abundance of rice, maize, and bananas. In the month of June frightful earthquakes shook the ground, and were continued unceasingly for two whole months. On the night of the 28th September the earth was violently convulsed, and a region of many leagues in extent was slowly raised until it attained a height of about 500 feet over a surface of many square leagues. The earth undulated like the waves of the sea in a tempest; thousands of small hills alternately rose and fell, and, finally, an immense gulf opened, from which smoke, fire, red-hot stones and ashes were violently discharged, and darted to prodigious heights. Six mountains emerged from this gaping gulf; among which the volcanic mountain Jorullo rises 2,890 feet above the ancient plain, to the height of 4,265 feet above the sea.

At the moment when the earthquake commenced the two rivers Cuitiinba and San Pedro flowed backwards, inundating all the plain now occupied by Jorullo; but in the regions which continually rose, a gulf opened and swallowed up the rivers. They reappeared to the west, but at a point very distant from their former beds.

This inundation reminds us on a small scale of the phenomena which attended the deluge of Noah.

Besides the deposits resulting from the partial deluges which we have described as occurring in Europe and Asia during the Quaternary epoch there were produced in the same period many new formations resulting from the deposition of alluvia thrown down by seas and rivers. These deposits are always few in number, and widely disseminated. Their stratification is as regular as that of any which belong to preceding periods; they are distinguished from those of the Tertiary epoch, -with which they are most likely to be confounded, bytheir situation, which is very frequently upon the shores of the sea, and by the predominance of shells of a species identical with those now living in the adjacent seas.

A marine formation of this kind, which, after constituting the coast of Sicily, principally on the side of Girgenti, Syracuse, Catania, and Palermo, occupies the centre of the island, where it rises to the

height of 3,000 feet, is amongst the most remarkable of the great Quaternary European productions. It is chiefly formed of two great beds; the lower a bluish argillaceous marl, the other a coarse but very compact limestone, both containing shells analogous to those of the present Mediterranean coast. The same formation is found in the neighbouring islands, especially in Sardinia and Malta. The great sandy deserts of Africa, as well as the argillo-arenaceous formation of the steppes of Eastern Russia, and the fertile Tchornozem, or " black earth " of its southern plains, have the same geological origin;. so have the Travertines of Tuscany, Naples, and Rome, and the Tufas, which are an essential constituent of the Neapolitan soil.

The pampas of South America — which consist of an argillaceous soil of a deep reddish-brown colour, with horizontal beds of marly clay and calcareous tufa, containing shells either actually living now in the Atlantic, or identical with fresh-water shells of the country — ought surely to be considered as a Quaternary deposit, of even greater extent than the preceding.

We are now approaching so near to our own age, that we can, as it were, trace the hand of Nature in her works. Professor Ramsay shows, in the Memoirs of the Government Geological Survey, that beds nearly a mile in thickness have been removed by denudation from the summit of the Mendip Hills, and that broad areas in South AVales and the neighbouring counties have been denuded of their higher beds, the materials being transported elsewhere to form newer strata. Now, no combination of causes has been imagined which has not involved submersion during long periods, and subsequent elevation for periods of longer or shorter duration.

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