The third hypothesis is that of Mr. Buffon, to which the unfortunate Baily has done the honour of acceding. According to him, the earth having been originally in a state of fusion, and for many years red hot, at last cooled down to the degree that rendered it habitable. This hypothesis he was led to imagine from the necessity of admitting that the globe was, to a certain distance beneath its surface, originally in a soft state. The solution of its solid parts in water he thought impossible; falsely imagining that the whole globe must have been in a state of solution, whereas the figure of the earth requires the liquidity of it only a few miles beneath its surface, Epoques 10 and 35. If he had trod the path of experiments, he would have found the hardness and transparency, of what he calls his primitive glass, and thinks the primitive substance of the globe, namely, quartz, to be altered in a strong heat, with a loss of 3 per cent. of its weight; and that so far from its having been a glass, it is absolutely infusible. The loss of weight, he must have seen, could be ascribed to nothing else but the loss of its watery particles, and that therefore it must have been originally formed in water; he would have found that some feldt-spars lose 40 per cent.; and others at least 2 per cent. by heat; he would have perceived that mica, which he thinks only an exfoliation of quartz, to be, in its composition, essentially different. He certainly found their crystallization inexplicable, for he does not even attempt to explain it.

But waving this, and a multitude of other insuperable difficulties in his hypothesis, and adverting only to the solution he thinks his theory affords of the phenomenon of the existence of bones of elephants, and the carcass of a rhinoceros in Siberia,

I say it is defective even in that respect. For allowing his supposition, that Siberia was at any time of a temperature so suited to the constitution of these animals, that they might live in it, yet the remains lately found in that country, cannot be supposed to belong to animals that ever lived in it.

1st. Because, though they are found at the distance of several hundred miles from the sea, yet they are surrounded by genuine marine vegetables, which shows that they were brought thither together with these vegetables.

2dly. Because they are generally found in accumulated heaps; and it is not to be imagined that while alive they sought a common burial-place, any more than they at present do in India.

3dly. Because the rhinoceros was found entire and unputrified; whereas, if the country was warm when he perished, this could not have happened.

4thly. Because, in no very distant latitude, namely, that of Greenland, the bones of whales, and not of elephants, are found on the mountains; consequently, that latitude must have been in that ancient period sufficiently cold to maintain whales, as it is at this day; and that cold we know to be very considerable, and incompatible with the proximity of the climate suited to elephants. 17 N. Comment. Petropol. 576. 1 Stet. Petrolop. 55. Renov. 73. Therefore the animals whose remains are now found in Siberia, could not have lived in it.

The fourth hypothesis is that of Mr. Edward King, but much amplified and enlarged by Mr. De Luc. This justly celebrated philosopher is of opinion, that the actual continents were, before the deluge, the bottom, or bed of the ancient ocean; and that the deluge consisted in the submersion of the ancient continents, which consequently form

the bed or bottom of our actual oceans; consequently, our actual mountains were all formed in the antediluvian ocean, and thus shells might be left on their highest summits.

In this hypothesis the ancient continents must have existed in those tracts now covered by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans: if so, I do not see how the elephants could have been brought into Siberia, or a whole rhinoceros found in it: for Siberia being then the bottom of some ocean, the sea must have moved from it to cover the sinking continents, instead of moving towards it to strew over it their spoils. If it be said that these animals were carried into the sea before the flood, then surely the rhinoceros should have been devoured, and only his bones left.

To say nothing of the incompatibility of this system with the principal geologic phenomena, mentioned in my former Essay, and of the destruction of at least all the graminivorous fish that must have followed from their transfer to a soil not suited to them, it is evidently inconsistent with the Mosaic account of this catastrophe; which account, however, these philosophers admit.

Moses ascribes the deluge to two principal causes, a continual rain for forty days, and the eruption of the waters of the great abyss. Now to what purpose a rain of forty days to overwhelm a continent that was to be immersed under a whole ocean? He tells us the waters increased on the continents a certain number of days, rested thereon another period of days, and then retired. Do not these expressions imply a permanent ground on which they increased and rested, and from which they afterwards retreated? As the retreat followed the advance, is it not clear that they retreated from the same spaces on which they had before advanced and rested?

Mr. De Luc replies, that in the 13th verse of the 5th chapter of Genesis, it is said the earth should be destroyed, and that Mr. Michaelis so translates it. However, it is plain, from what has been just mentioned, that Moses did not understand such a destruction as should cause it to disappear totally and for ever; he tells us, that the waters stood fifteen cubits over the highest mountains; now, as he has no where mentioned the antediluvian mountains, but has the postdiluvian, it is plain, it is to these his narration relates; and these, he tells us, were, at the time of the deluge, covered with water, and uncovered when the waters diminished: he never distinguished the postdiluvian from the antediluvian, and therefore must have considered them as the same.

Mr.

Nor did Noah himself believe the ancient continents destroyed; for he took the appearance of an olive-branch to be a sign of the diminution of the flood. This he certainly believed to have grown on the ancient continent, and could not have expected it to have shot up from the bottom of the sea. De Luc tells us this olive grew on an antediluvian island, and that these islands, being part of the antediluvian ocean, were not flooded. It is plain, however, Noah did not think so, else he would not judge the appearance of the olive to be a sign of the diminution of the waters. Where is it mentioned, or what renders it necessary to infer that islands existed before the flood? If islands did exist, and were to escape the flood, so might their inhabitants also, contrary to the express words of the text.

It would surely be much more convenient to Noah, his family, and animals, to have taken refuge in one of them, than to remain pent up in the ark.

The dove, Moses tells us, returned the first time

she was let out of the ark, finding no place whereon to rest her feet; she consequently could not discover the island; whereas the raven never returned, plainly because he found carcasses whereon to feed; therefore these carcasses were not swallowed up, as Mr. De Luc would have it. Moses tells us that, at the cessation of the flood, the fountains of the deep were stopped or shut up; therefore, in his apprehension, instead of the ancient continents sinking into the deep, the waters of the abyss flowed from their sources upon that continent, and again returned; from all which it follows, that this hypothesis is as indefensible as the foregoing.

Passing over the systems of Woodward, Burnet, and Whiston, which have been repeatedly refuted, I recur to the account given of this great revolution by Moses himself, taken in its plain literal sense, as the only one that appears perfectly consistent with all the phenomena now known, of which I shall find occasion to mention many; he plainly ascribes it to a supernatural cause, namely, the express intention of God to punish mankind for their crimes. We must therefore consider the deluge as a miraculous effusion of water, both from the clouds and the great abyss; if the waters, situated partly within and partly without the great caverns of the globe, were once sufficient to cover even the highest mountains, as I have shown in a former essay, they must have been sufficient to do so a second time, when miraculously educed out of these caverns. Early geologists, not attending to these facts, thought all the waters of the ocean insufficient; it was supposed that its mean depth did not exceed a quarter of a mile, and that only half of the surface of the globe was covered by it: on these data, Keil computed that twenty-eight oceans would be requisite to cover