Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/340

330 claimed, like the fossil shells, as evidence of the former presence of the sea, and even of the Biblical deluge. It is not, however, necessary, from this point of view, that the accounts in question should all be true; it is enough that they should be believed and reasoned upon. In the seventeenth century, Fray Pedro Simon relates that some miners, running an adit into a hill near Callao, "met with a ship which had on top of it the great mass of the hill, and did not agree in its make and appearance with our ships," whence people judged that it had been left there by the Flood, and the fact is cited in proof of the habitation of the country in antediluvian times. Writing in 1730, Strahlenberg gives it as his opinion that the mammoth bones in Siberia are relics of the Deluge, and goes on to add a like example, that some thirty years earlier the whole lower hull of a ship with a keel was found in Barabinsk Tartary, where nevertheless there is no ocean. Lastly, in Scotland it is quite a common thing for ancient canoes hollowed from a single tree to be found buried in places remote from navigable channels, while the skeletons of whales are found in similar situations. Sir John Clerk thus remarks upon a canoe found near Edinburgh in 1726. "The washings of the river Carron discovered a boat, 13 or 14 feet underground; it is 36 feet in length, and 4 in breadth, all of one piece of oak. There were several strata above it, such as loam, clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel; these strata demonstrate it to have been an antediluvian boat."

Both in Scotland and in South America, upheaval of land in more or less modern times is a recognized fact, and the finding of boats, as of various other productions of human art, in places where they could hardly have been placed by man, is readily accounted for between this upheaval and the effects of ordinary accumulation and degradation.

Geological evidence bearing on traditions of a Deluge is scarce. Sir Charles Lyell seems disposed to adopt the view of old writers that some of the South American deluge traditions are connected