Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/339

Rh rial that in remote antiquity the waters of the deluge flooded the district, and when they retired, the places where they had been made their appearance covered with sand. . . . However it may have happened, to follow the great geographer Ti-chi, a part of this country is in great plains, where several hundred leagues are found to have been covered by the waters and since abandoned; this is why these deserts are called the Sandy Sea, which indicates that they were not originally covered with sand and gravel."

Again, the presence of fossil shells on high mountains has long been adduced as evidence of the Noachic flood. Thus Tertullian connects the sea-shells on mountains with the reappearance of the earth from below the waters, and the argument may be followed up through later times, and was current in England till quite recently. In the ninth edition of Home's 'Introduction to the Scriptures,' published in 1846, the evidence of fossils is confidently held to prove the universality of the Deluge; but the argument disappears from the next edition, published ten years later.

To the statements of classical writers as to anchors and pieces of wreck being found inland, some more modern accounts must be added. From time to time, whether from upheaval of the earth's surface or other geological changes, ships and things belonging to them have been found far inland, in places for ages out of reach of navigable waters. Buffon speaks of fragments of vessels being found in a mountain lake in Portugal, far from the sea, and mentions a statement of Sabinus, in his commentary on the lines just quoted from Ovid, that in the year 1460 a vessel was found with its anchors, in a mine in the Alps. This is, no doubt, the same story that Antonio Galvano refers to, when he says, "Thus they tell of finding hulls of ships and iron anchors in the mountains of Switzerland very far inland, where it appears that there was never sea nor salt water."

The bearing of such phenomena on the formation of diluvial traditions is clearly shown by their having been repeatedly