Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/806

786 by ordinary people on the shore." I say he stumbles upon it, because he mentions it only in so far as it comes handy for the purpose of showing the inconsistencies of the popular notions of heaped-up waters upon a steady land. But he does not deal with it or consider it in its true connection—namely, as showing that this popular notion finds no support in the Hebrew narrative. Dr. Geikie's early paper on the Deluge, written not lately but some thirty years ago, stands, as regards this, in creditable contrast with the heedless representations of Prof. Huxley. Dr. Geikie did, indeed, fall apparently into the same strange error of holding that every partial deluge must of necessity have involved a universal one, an argument which rests wholly on the notion that any such deluge must have been caused by a heaping up of water over a stationary land. But Dr. Geikie, with characteristic sagacity, emphasizes and dwells upon the fact that the Hebrew narrative does not suppose any violent or convulsive action, and that in this respect the popular imagination of it has been quite unjustified. But even Dr. Geikie's paper, fair and candid as it intended to be, does not point out the unquestionable conclusions, that the whole idea of the narrative in Genesis assumes a deluge caused by a slow and gradual subsidence of the land, and not caused by any capture of it by some sudden assault and battery of the sea. This conclusion does not depend on the true meaning of archaic and obscure expression, such as the "breaking up of the fountains of the great deep," which are almost incapable of an exact physical interpretation. It depends on the structure of the whole narrative, and on the incidents which it includes. Its importance does not lie in any question touching the sources of that narrative, or the conceptions entertained by those who have handed it down. Its importance depends on the suggestion which arises out of it, whether intended or not, that the physical impossibility of a partial deluge is an argument founded on the most ignorant of all preconceptions, and is demonstrably the grossest of all delusions. That there can not have been partial subsidences of the crust of the earth—even on an enormous scale—would indeed be an ignorant proposition, contradicted alike by theory and observation.

But here we come to another branch of the subject, on which, if anywhere, we had a right to expect from Prof. Huxley something better than the most loose and yet the most dogmatic declamation. This branch is that which deals with the actual discoveries of modern science, so far as they bear upon the question. Geology is a science which has made such rapid and enormous progress during a period spanned by the extreme measure of a