Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/801

Rh explanation of the universality—or nearly so—of the tradition of a great flood among all branches of the human race. The late eminent French scholar Lenormant marshaled and collated the evidence on this subject not long ago, and came to the conclusion that a tradition so wide-spread, if not actually universal, must have arisen from the memory of some great catastrophe which did actually take place, and had left an indelible impression on the progenitors of every race. Prof. Huxley takes no notice whatever of this argument, although the fact on which it rests is fairly stated in a careful and temperate article by Dr. A. Geikie, upon the Deluge, to which the professor himself refers. No hypothesis which does not take notice of this fact can rest on adequate scientific reasoning.

The question then naturally arises whether it is or is not possible that there may have been, since the birth of man, some great catastrophe far more wide-spread than the inundations of any river; and whether the narrative in Genesis of the Flood may not be the account of this catastrophe—told in its religious aspect, just as the previous narrative of Creation is an account of that (to us) inconceivable operation—told in the same connection—that is to say, in its connection with the final causes of the Divine government and action.

Now, in dealing with this question scientifically there are three things which must be done: first, there must be a careful view given of the purely physical phenomena which are really of necessity involved in the form of the narrative in Genesis as it has come down to us; secondly, there must be another view given, as careful and complete, of any conclusions relative to the subject which have been really established by geology or by any other branch of the physical sciences; and, thirdly, there must be a frank and free confession of the ignorances of science—of the problems which it sees but which hitherto it has failed to solve, and of the unexhausted possibilities of physical causation which lie wholly unknown behind them. Prof. Huxley's article does not comply with any one of these conditions. He does not state fairly, but on the contrary most unfairly, what the narrative in Genesis does of necessity involve. He does not set forth fairly what are the related facts which geology may claim to have established; while—above all—with regard to the ignorances of science, he seems wholly unconscious even of that sober estimate of his favorite agnosticism which true science impresses on us all.

He starts with songs of triumph over the very general abandonment of the idea that the Deluge could have been universal, complete, and simultaneous over the whole globe. He might as