We may well account for all the phænomena of which our naturalists are so full, without running the length of their imagination for a solution. If we consider the accounts and effects of many lesser inundations, which have happened in divers parts of the world, we may explain such effects as are mentioned by the poet : " Vidi ego, quæ quondam fuerat solidissima tellus OVID. MET. lib. 15. Great tracts, which were formerly dry land, may be now in the sea; and much of what the waters formerly covered, is in many parts of the world become dry and habitable ground. The shells of sea-fish are often seen in parts very remote from any seas, and ancient anchors have been found upon the tops of mountains: a flow of waters has gullied plains into deep valleys;, and hills have been washed down, and borne away into the ocean. Our own country might afford many demonstrative facts of this nature. In the levels of Cambridgeshire, there are many reasons to think, that there was formerly a surface which now lies buried some yards deep under the present soil. The bottom of some rivers shew it;* * See Dugdale's History of Embanking. and in setting down a sluice, there has been found, sixteen feet deep, a smith's forge and the tools thereunto belonging, with several horse-shoes. At Whittlesey, in that county, in digging through the moor, at eight feet deep, they came, we are told, to a perfect soil of what is called sword-ground. Timber-trees of several kinds, it is said, lie deeply buried in other places; and in some parts, skeletons of fishes, whole and entire, lic many feet under ground in a silt. From all these ap-" pearances, our naturalists inform us, with great show of probability, that some ancient land-floods have brought down from the higher countries a prodigious wash of soil with their waters; that these waters, not finding á sufficient outlet to run off with a strong current, spread over the whole level the adventitious earth brought with them, which in time hardened and incrusted to a new surface over the old ground, covering whatever was overflowed upon the former lands, and containing the exuvia of whatever fish or animals were choaked and buried in it. From these lesser' effects of lesser causes, we may, I think, well trace the greater effects of greater. If an inundation of so small a country, as an inland level, heaped a soil over the face of it yards deep, why might not the universal deluge of the world, in places where the drain from them might let away the water, but retain the sediment, lodge vast and mountainous tracts of adventitious earth; in which might be buried all the layers of the exuvia, which are the noted curiosities of their strata, and over which the earths they were buried in, were at first but wet mud, loose mould, gritty sand, loam or marl; little particles of stony substance; some of all aptitudes for all sorts of accretion, concoction, and vegetation; and which have accordingly, in the maturation of ages, remained sandy and sabulous earth in all kinds, or become rocks or minerals, veins of metals, or quarries of all sorts of stone, according to the respective natures of their component particles and constitution? The hills, as the waters surmounted all, might in many places, where their summits were plain and extensive, and the fall from them but little, have their tops hugely heaped, and their sides every way loaded with these incrustations. In countries also where a great fall was open for the waters from high hills, and a spacious outlet for their currents into the sea, mountains of this adventitious soil might be carried off through the channels of large rivers, deepened by the torrents borne through them, and the face of the adjacent lands, scoured indeed of some of its own surface, might have its boundaries left much the same after, as before such deluge. The depths to which the labour of man has, or ever can explore the earth, are, comparatively speaking, a mere span; for how little do the deepest mines approach towards the centre of our globe? It may probably be true, after all our naturalists have offered upon these subjects, that none of the shells and exuvia they talk of, such as really are, or have been what they take them for, have ever been found any where in the earth, but where the deluge heaped and left the soil where they are found. In other parts of the world, where the flood did not make new ground; if these parts were dug and opened to proper depths, undoubtedly we should find different layers or strata of earth, quarries of stones, or veins of minerals, such as may have been forming from the origin of things; but no such exuvie in these, as are found in like beds in the other places. And where the exuvia are found lying perpendicularly or aslope, and not in horizontal lines, I suspect that earthquakes, since the deluge, may have variously broken up these places from their deepest foundations; subverted the old, and made a new position of huge fragments of them... If in thus examining all that has been suggested, we can, after all, find such a situation in the present world, as Moses describes, which hath all appearance of being the tract where he marked out the boundaries of this land of Eden, and its garden; I conceive, that if those parts were dug up, and explored, such exuvia of the flood would be found in them, as to induce us to think, that such a spot of ground, as described by Moses, has existed both upon the antediluvian and postdiluvian earth. But let us consider, II. Whether the description of Moses does not plainly tell us what were the marks or bounds of his garden of Eden in the first world; and also as plainly, that these boundaries remained, but had new names, and were well known in the second. A river, he tells us, went out of Eden to water the garden, and it was a river of four heads this was the run and streams of the river of Eden, when the garden was first planted, and the man put into it. The words of Moses must have this, and can have no other intention. But Moses does not rest his description here; he proceeds to tell us what ! Gen. ii. 20. these rivers were called, and what countries they washed upon in after ages. He calls the first of the rivers Pison, the second Gihon, the third Hiddekel, and the fourth Euphrates." He tells us of the first river, that it compasseth the whole land of Havilah," a country noted for its gold and precious stones; of the second, that it compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia, or Cush; of the third, that it runs East into Assyria;a of the fourth, that it is the Euphrates. These names of the rivers here mentioned by Moses, three of them at least, are not, that I know of, mentioned any where by profane geographers; but the most ancient of these are mere moderns, comparatively speaking, with regard to the ancient scripture geography. The author of the book of Ecclesiasticus mentions both Pison and Gihon ;" and hints, that both were rivers, which at particular seasons of the year abounded in their flow of waters," and as not unworthy of being named with the Tigris and Euphrates; therefore we may think that in his day m Gen. ii, 11-14. Moses having told us that the garden was watered by a river from four heads; proceeds here to make, as it were, a new terrar of it, by giving it streams, and the countries they washed upon, those names by which they were called after the flood, &c. P The word we translate Ethiopia, is Cush in the Hebrew, Gen. ii. 13. See Connect. Sac. et Proph. Hist. b. iii. 1 Gen. ii. 14. Vide quæ post. Ibid. Ecclus. xxiv. 25-27, * Ibid. |