NOTE XII. p. 88.

For a description of the sites and remains of Babylon, Nineveh, &c. see Dr Keith on the Prophecies.

About the commencement of the Christian era, all traces of these ancient cities seem to have been lost, but recent travellers have discovered along the banks of the Tigris extensive ruins and mounds of earth, with vaults and caverns, all indicative of the former extent which Nineveh, the capital of the great Assyrian empire, is reported to have been-a city stretching 60 miles in circumference, defended by a wall of 100 feet, and 1300 towers of 200 feet in height.

NOTE XIII. p. 92.

Josephus says, that, during the twelve months of the prevalence of the deluge, "God changed the continent into sea." Philo, a Jew, who lived thiry years, B. C. writing on the same subject, perhaps partly from tradition and partly from his own conceptions of the Mosaic narrative, thus somewhat poetically says," The vast ocean being raised to an height which it had never before attained, rushed with a sudden inroad upon the islands and continents. The springs, rivers, and cataracts, confusedly mingling their streams, contributed to elevate the waters. Neither was the air quiet: dense and continuous clouds covered the whole heavens, violent hurricanes, thunders and lightnings, were blended with unintermitting torrents of rain; so that it seemed as if all parts of the universe were resolving themselves into the single element of water, until the fluid mass, having at length accumulated from the waters from above and from below, not only the lower lands, but even the

summits of the highest mountains, were submerged and disappeared. For every part of the earth sunk beneath the water, and the entire and perfect system of the world became (what it is not lawful either to speak or think) mutilated and deformed by a vast amputation." Philo de Abrahamo.

NOTE XIV. p. 96.

Cataclysmi universalis certa rudera ego nondum attigi quosque penetravi minus etiam veram terram Adamaticum, sed ubique vidi factas ex equoræ terras, et in his mera rudera longinque sensim præterlapsi œvi." Linnæus, Syst. Nat.

Dr Fleming thus writes,-" The simple narrative of Moses permits me to believe that the waters rose upon the earth by degrees and returned by degrees — that means were employed by the author of the calamity to preserve pairs of the land animals - that the flood exhibited no violent impetuosity, neither displacing the soil nor the vegetable tribes which it supported, nor rendering the ground unfit for the cultivation of the vine. With this conviction in my mind, I am not prepared to witness in nature any remaining marks of the catastrophe, and I feel my respect for the authority of revelation heightened, when I see, in the present surface, no memorials of the event. On the other hand, had I witnessed every valley and gravel bed-nay, every fossil bone-attesting the ravages of the dreadful scene, I would have been puzzled to account for the unexpected difficulties, and might have been induced to question the accuracy of Moses as an historian, or the claims of the Book of Genesis to occupy its present place in the sacred record."

"If the geological creeds of Baron Cuvier and Professor Buckland, be established as true in science, then must

the Book of Genesis be blotted out of the records of inspiration."-Edin. Philosoph. Journal, vol. xiv.

"I am of opinion, then, with M. De Luc and M. Dolomieu, that if there is any circumstance thoroughly established in geology, it is, that the crust of our globe has been subjected to a great and sudden revolution, the epoch of which cannot be dated much farther back than five or six thousand years ago; that this revolution had buried all the countries which were before inhabited by men and by the other animals that are now best known; that the same revolution had laid dry the bed of the last ocean which now forms all the countries at present inhabited-that the small number of individuals of men and other animals that escaped from the effects of that great revolution, have since propagated and spread over the lands then newly laid dry, and consequently that the human race has only resumed a progressive state of improvement since that epoch, by forming established societies, raising monuments, collecting natural facts, and constructing systems of science and of learning." Cuvier, Ossmens Fossils, tom. 1.

"The evidence which I have collected in my Reliquiæ Diluvianæ (1823) shews, that one of the last great physical events that have affected the surface of our globe was a violent inundation, which overwhelmed great part of the nothern hemisphere, and that this event was followed by the sudden disappearance of a large number of the species of terrestrial quadrupeds, which had inhabited these regions in the period immediately preceding it. I also ventured to apply the name diluvium to the superficial beds of gravel, clay, and sand, which appear to have been produced by this great irruption of water.

"The description of the facts that form the evidence presented in this volume is kept distinct from the question of the identity of the event attested by them, with any deluge recorded in history. Discoveries that have

been made since the publication of this work shew that many of the animals there described existed during more than one geological period preceding the catastrophe by which they were extirpated. Hence it seems more probable that the event in question was the last of the many geological revolutions that have been produced by violent eruptions of water, rather than the comparatively tranquil inundation described in the inspired narrative."-DR BUCKLAND'S Bridgewater Treatise, note, p. 95, vol. i.

Mr Greenough, too, after having borrowed the tail of Whiston's comet to produce his deluge, (1820) publicly renounces his belief in any general catastrophe in his address to the Geological Society, 1836.

In alluding to these changes of opinion, we by no means presume to hold them up to censure. The avowal of them, on the contrary, indicates a true nobleness of mind. We merely point them out as instances of the vacillating nature of geological theories; and, it may be, the progressive tendency of science, where every new step is but the correction of an old error.

The idea of the destruction of the antidiluvian continents has been objected to from the enumeration in Genesis, ii. 11-14, of the Euphrates and other three rivers still existing in Asia. Now, this very description in Genesis shews, that the "river which went out of Eden, and was parted, and became into four heads," could not apply to any known existing river, nor, in the most remote degree, to the Euphrates, the Heddekel, or Tigris, &c. because these latter take their rise from distinct sources, not from one common head. These names, probably of antediluvian rivers, must have been applied by the descendants of Noah to those of the new continents: or the four verses may have been added as a marginal note to the original text of Genesis. Marginal notes of this kind, ascertained to exist in the most ancient MSS. have been incorporated into the holy text, or, at least, there are strong grounds for presuming so,