Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/364

348 may gladly welcome any attempt to deal with it, especially by one who has given so much attention to its investigation.

It was the opinion of the late Dr. Buckland, an opinion which was concurred in by Greenough, Conybeare, and other able writers of their time, that the general dispersion of gravel, sand, and loam, over hills and elevated plains, as well as valleys, was the result of a universal deluge, which is described as transient, simultaneous, and of a date not very remote; that the existing system of valleys was mainly due to the same cause, and that thus both valleys and gravels preceded our present river systems. Cuvier, and the French geologists generally, have held the same opinion, but of late years it seems to have been altogether discredited by English authors, with perhaps the exception of the late Sir Roderick Murchison. We may well entertain doubts as to the occurrence of a deluge that should be both universal and simultaneous; and it is probable that it is chiefly on that account that Dr. Buckland's theory has met with so little favor. Still, although we may be unable to adopt his views in their entirety, his statements, as to the diluvial characters of the English drifts, seem entitled to some .further consideration before they are set aside altogether, and on this account it is fortunate that the recent discoveries of flint implements have excited so much interest in the gravels in question, as to induce Mr. Evans to devote no inconsiderable portion of his work to the history and antiquity of the river-drift.

In the last chapter he has adduced an elaborate argument in favor of the belief in fluviatile transport as opposed to diluvial, by showing first, hypothetically, the possibility that "deposits now occupying the summits of hills have originally been formed in and about river-beds," and then, by reference to the actual phenomena, the probability that the implement-bearing beds were thus formed. No one can doubt, upon the hypothesis here stated, that rivers may have possessed at one time a far greater power of excavating and deepening their channels than now; but then the author is obliged to assume the prevalence of several conditions, and notably a far more rigorous climate, and a greater amount of rainfall; conditions as to which we have but little evidence, and some of that is of a doubtful tendency. If, as is now supposed, the hippopotamus and elephant and rhinoceros remained here all the winter, they would have fared but badly, had the climate been as severe as is supposed.

But passing by these topics as not bearing very immediately upon the question of transport, it cannot be doubted that submergence, by means of diluvial action, is quite possible, since we have many instances of it within the historical period, and some indeed within the last few years; and, both modes of transport being alike possible, the probabilities of the case have alone to be considered; and, notwithstanding the various reasons so ably stated by Mr. Evans, it does not seem that there are sufficient grounds for rejecting Dr. Buckland's