ing to the old opinion. We find from the words of the narrative, that the patriarch Noah was intrusted with the task of collection. To achieve it, then, he must have gone in person, or sent expeditions, to Australia for the kangaroo and the wombat, to the frozen North for the Polar bear, to Africa for the gorilla and the chimpanzee; the hippopotamus of the Nile, the elk, the bison, the dodo, the apteryx, the emeu and the cassowary must have been brought together by vast efforts from distant quarters. The patriarch or his agents must have been endowed with a supernatural knowledge of natural history far surpassing Solomon's or that of our own times, that they might properly distinguish varieties and species, so that no species might be omitted and none represented by more than one variety. To accomplish this with the minutest insects, they must have been provided with powerful microscopes. Every portion of the dry land of the globe must have been accessible to them; every jungle, cavern, and ravine. The little islands that lose themselves in mid-ocean must all have been ransacked; the search, too, that might not neglect any acre of ground in all the continents of the world, would be distracted with the most varied and incongruous pursuits. Sheep, game, caterpillars, beasts of prey, snails, eagles, fleas and titmice, must all have their share of attention. Unusual pains must be employed to secure them uninjured. They must be fed and cared for during a journey, perhaps, of thousands of miles, till they reach the ark; they must be hindered from devouring one another while the search is continued for rats and bats and vipers and toads and

scorpions, and other animals which a patriarch, specially singled out as just and upright and a lover of peace, would naturally wish and naturally be selected to transmit as a boon to his favoured descendants.

It might be asked how, with the supernatural knowledge requisite for collecting all the terrestrial animals of the globe, and the unique opportunity for observation afforded by a residence of some months with them in the ark, no more scientific classification was arrived at than that into birds and beasts and creeping things? But letting this pass, or scattering it and other objections to the winds by inventing a miracle to explain the gathering together of the animals, we shall then have to give some account of their re-distribution. Instead of worrying ourselves with the problem, shall we at once solve it by asserting that they were miraculously retransferred to the habitations from which they came? This will be a highly satisfactory plan, if only it will stop the mouths of those inquisitive persons who never know when they are beaten in an argument. But one cavil may easily be foreseen, requiring a new miracle to satisfy it; for many of the animals must either have been miraculously supplied with provisions, or miraculously enabled to do without them; or else, to take a single instance, two spiders would have been limited to a couple of flies, and when the flies had become extinct, because devoured by the spiders, the spiders also would have become extinct through having no more flies to devour; and thus their preservation in the ark, at the expense of a great many unrecorded and

highly improbable miracles, would have been utterly useless.

Suppose, however, that they were spread over the earth again by the slow process of natural distribution. Certain perplexities, indeed, may have arisen when they first issued from the ark, when the cobra and the rattlesnake, the hungry wolf and the relentless tiger were let loose upon the impoverished world and its defenceless inhabitants. For at that conjuncture to have destroyed even one cruel and venomous beast might have blotted out a whole species. It is surely a little remarkable that ravenous beasts and birds of prey should have been limited, even while in the ark, to feeding upon animals in a ceremonial or ecclesiastical sense clean; but if, after they had left the ark, and had once more to provide for themselves, the wily panther and the treacherous hyena must be imagined debating before every meal whether their victim belonged to the sevens of the clean or the couples of the unclean animals, shall we not turn in pity and vexation from any view that involves and admits so monstrous a supposition?

But we will concede that every creature bore a charmed life, that it might not perish by famine or violence till it had propagated its kind. We should then expect to observe that species had distributed themselves over the globe in lines either tortuous or direct, single or branching, broad or narrow, but all diverging from a common centre. Yet nothing of the kind is found. On the contrary, the species of the new world differ from those of the old, the species of one

continent from those of another1. The marsupials of Australia and Polynesia are generically distinct from all other animals on the globe except the opossum. The elephant of Africa is not the same species as the elephant of India: so with the lion, so with the rhinoceros. The apes and baboons of the old world are nowhere to be found in America, nor the American monkeys anywhere in the old world. In Madagascar, separated from Africa by less than the breadth of England, all the species except one, and nearly all the genera, are peculiar2. Everywhere species are found limited in their range by natural barriers, such as climate, rivers, mountains, oceans. Are we to suppose that the prisoners could scramble into their prisons, and then suddenly became incapable of scrambling out again? Everywhere, as a rule, this range is consistent with the hypothesis of an origin central to the range, inconsistent with that of an origin distant from it. Where, as on mountain ranges, we find, contrary to the general rule, the same species in different localities, the migration from the door of the ark loses all semblance of probability, unless we are pleased to imagine that creatures, now without the instinct of migration, for a long time possessed it, and roamed about the world through many a sultry plain to pick out a hill-side here and there with a temperature suited to their constitutions. But the exceptional phenomenon, otherwise so hard to account for, Darwin has admirably explained, by pointing out that species adapted

1 Lyell, Principles of Geology,' ii. 332.

2 Ibid. ii. 344.

to a low temperature would naturally have occupied lowlands in the Glacial Period, from which, as the cold gradually grew less and less intense, they would as naturally have retired, some of them northwards, others to the cool heights of various mountains.

That there was a Glacial Period, when great icebergs travelled over England, a period geologically as but of yesterday, though enormously more remote than any historical dates, is now beyond all question. Equally beyond question is it that countless ages and generations of living beings on the earth preceded that Glacial Period. And, added to this, we find that there are forms of life just where they would have been left by the effect of that period, had there been an unbroken succession from that time to this, and just where it is most unlikely they should be found, had they been forced to travel to those habitations from the door of the ark within the practically insignificant period of 4300 years.

But still further, we may compare the world of life before the Flood with the world of life since. And here surely it needs not the genius of Darwin or Lyell or Owen to perceive the conclusiveness of the argument which their genius has pointed out and enforced. For instance, where the marsupials now live, there lived marsupials in ages long before Noah, as the fossil remains testify. The fossils are fossil marsupials, but marsupials of species now extinct. So that the door of the ark' theory requires us to believe that the marsupials found their way to Australia, leaving no traces of their route on land, crossing seas which they never subse