Great Deluge

“ An immense wave has been thrown suddenly on the surface of the earth, making great ravages in its passage, furrowing the earth and driving before it débris of all sorts in its disorderly course. Geologists give the name of diluvium to a formation thus removed and scattered, which, from its heterogeneous nature, brings under our eyes, as it were, the rapid passage of an impetuous torrent—a phenomenon which is commonly designated as a deluge. ”

“ On the larboard side the waves washed to the top of the great elliptical dome and broke over it, and their thundering blows shook the vessel to her center, causing many to believe that she was about to founder.
The disorder was frightful. Men and women were flung about like tops, and no one could keep his feet. Crash after crash, that could be heard amid the howling of the storm, the battering of the waves, and the awful roar of the deluge descending on the roof, told the fate of the tableware and dishes that had been hastily left in the big dining saloon. ”

“ The Great Deep had resumed its ancient reign, and what was left of the habitable globe presented to view only far separated islands and the serrated tops of such ranges as the Alps, the Caucasus, the Himalayas, and the Andes. The astonished inhabitants of the ocean depths now swam over the ruins of great cities, and brushed with their fins the chiseled capitals of columns that had supported the proudest structures of human hands.
We have seen how the unexpected arrest of the flood had left Cosmo uncertain as to the course that he ought to pursue. ”

“ It is an ether myth. The attempt to explain the existence of the world on the basis of an ether myth was not uncommon. The deluge was not the last of these destructions. Some races supposed a great fire to have swept over the earth and to have destroyed all save a few who hid themselves in caves."
4. We may understand the basis of the deluge story to be a legend transmitting historical memories which, though mythical and colored, have still the fate of actual men as their subject — an historical origin.
This is the view advanced by Delitzsch. [3]
5. ”

“ Like the deluge in the days of Noah, it fills the valleys first, and covers the low places; but, unlike the deluge, there are elevations which the swelling waters never reach, heights upon which the dark tide never shows even its spray. In our great cities, those sections which are recognized as the homes and dens of vice and degradation, the very region and shadow of death, abound in dance-houses ”

“ Nevertheless there died in the deluge none of those mentioned in the sacred Scripture as descended from Seth. But here is the divine account of the cause of the deluge: “The Lord God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. ”

“ This fact shows that the tradition of the Deluge was preserved in Asia Minor from a very remote antiquity. In India, ancient mythological books have been shown to contain fragmentary accounts of some great overflow corresponding in a remarkable degree with that given by Moses. The Africans, the Chinese, and the American Indians even, have traditions of a flood in the early annals of the world, and of the preservation of the human race and of animated nature by means of an ark. It is impossible to account for the universality of this legend, unless the fact of the Deluge be admitted. ”

“ The Bible gives us a definite epoch, that of the deluge, about 2000 to 3000 B.C., for all existing races of men; but this, according to it, was only the second starting-point of humanity, and though no family but that of Noah survived the terrible catastrophe, it would be a great error to suppose that nothing antediluvian appears in the subsequent history of man. Before the deluge there were arts and an old civilization, extending over at least two thousand years, and after the deluge men carried with them these heirlooms of the old world to commence with them new nations. ”

“ Then back west to Meru, and north to Beauvais. Now and again the scarred walls of the end-houses of villages told where the Allies had fought on the great retreat.
At La Deluge—suitable name—an outlying farm was half burnt and in ruins. Here a small body of Germans had been wiped out by a French detachment in a six hours' siege. But an impassive farmer was leading his horses out of the ruins to resume work in the long-deserted fields. ”

“ These authors unite in declaring that the various indications of diluvial action must be referred to several partial inundations, which have taken place at different times, among which the indications of the deluge described in scripture, cannot be identified or distinguished; that this opinion may now be advanced "with the authority of established truth;" that the former opinion may be regarded as "a philosophic heresy," and that "we have not found the certain traces of any great diluvial catastrophe which we can affirm to be within the human period." ”

“ With its twoscore lofty stories, and its massive base, this wonderful structure rose above the lower quarter of the city, and dominated it, like a veritable Tower of Babel, made to defy the flood. Many thousands of people evidently regarded it in that very light, and they had fled from all quarters, as soon as the great downpour began, to find refuge within its mountainous flanks. There were men—clerks, merchants, brokers from the downtown offices—and women and children from neighboring tenements. ”

“ A modern painter, certainly possessing very great talent, has attempted a picture of the Deluge. He has crowded into it a great many horrors, all very horrible; but the principal group will be sufficient.
“It consists of a family vainly endeavouring to escape from the surrounding destruction by climbing a rock in the foreground. The agonies of such a moment might have been expressed most touchingly, had the artist chosen to keep within the bounds of moderation: but no, he must out-Herod Herod ”

“ It seems to establish the countries lying at the foot of the Caucasus as the cradle of the human race; and it seems to establish also the upheaval of a chain of mountains, preceded by an eruption of volcanic mud, which drowned vast territories entirely composed, in these regions, of plains of great extent. Of this deluge many races besides the Jews have preserved a tradition. Moses dates it from 1,500 to 1,800 years before the epoch in which he wrote. ”

“ It came even sooner than he had anticipated, with the results that we have already noted in New York. At first many thought that the ark itself would be destroyed, so dreadful was the impact of the falling water. The women and children, and some of the men, were seized with panic, and Cosmo had great difficulty in reassuring them.
"The flood will not reach us for several hours yet," he said. "The level of the water must rise at least a hundred feet more before we shall be afloat. Inside here we are perfectly safe. The ark is exceedingly strong and absolutely tight. You have nothing to fear." ”

“ The whole upper atmosphere was choked with dense clouds, which swirled and tumbled, and twisted themselves into great vortical rolls, spinning like gigantic millshafts. Once, one of these vortexes shot downward, with projectile speed, rapidly assuming the terrible form of the trombe of a tornado, and where it struck the ground it tore everything to pieces—trees, houses, the very earth itself were ground to powder and then whirled aloft by the resistless suction. ”

“ What are the causes which have produced the present inequalities of the globe—the mountain-ranges, continents, and waters? The primordial cause is, as we have had frequent occasion to repeat, the cooling of the earth, and the progressive solidification of the external crust, the nucleus of which still remains in a fluid or viscous state. These have produced the contortions, furrows, and fractures which have led to the elevation of the great mountain-ranges and the depression of the great valleys—which have caused some continents to emerge from the bed of ocean and have submerged others. ”

“ As the interior became solid and concrete by cooling, furrows, corrugations, and depressions in the external crust of the globe would occur, causing great inequalities in its surface; producing, in short, what are now called chains of mountains.
At other times, in lieu of furrows and irregularities, the solid crust has become ruptured, producing fissures and fractures in the outer envelope, sometimes of immense extent. The liquid substances contained in the interior of the globe, with or without the action of the gases they enclose, escape through these openings ”

“ In consequence of the popular excitement caused by the sensational utterance of a notorious pretender to scientific knowledge in New York, the council of this institution authorizes the statement that it has examined the alleged grounds on which the prediction of a great flood, to be caused by a nebula encountering the earth, is based, and finds, as all real men of science knew beforehand, that the entire matter is simply a canard. ”

“ If there is any country where we should think it likely that the reminiscences of the Deluge would be effaced, it would be in a country periodically subject to inundations, where the people are annually made familiar with its incidents, and where its recurrence is not to them a cause of alarm, but a matter of expectation and joy. ”

“ The principal cause, then, of the great dislocations of the earth’s crust is, so to speak, at our gates; it threatens us unceasingly. Of this the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which are still frequent in our [490] day, give us disastrous and incontestable proofs. On the other hand, our seas are continually forming new land: the bed of the Baltic Sea, for instance, is gradually rising, in consequence of the deposits which will obviously fill up its area entirely in an interval of time which it might not be impossible to calculate. ”

“ The only assumption required to enable us to explain the great thickness of salt in such an area, is the continuance for an indefinite period of a subsidence, the country preserving all the time a general approach to horizontally.” The observations of Mr. Darwin on the atolls of the Pacific, prove that such a continuous subsidence is probable. ”

“ At New York the complete drowning of the city did not occur until the downpour from the sky began."
"Oh! that deluge from the heavens!" cried the king. "What we had suffered before seemed but little in comparison. It came upon us after night; and the absolute darkness, the awful roaring, the terrific force of the falling water, the sense of suffocation, the rapid filling of the barge until the water was about our necks—these things drove us wild with despair. ”

“ Numerous gullies intersect their flanks, and the largest of these, Corry N’Eoin, presents a series of rocky amphitheatres, or rather large caldrons, whose walls have been ground down by long-continued glacial action: the quartz-veins are all shorn down to the level of the gneiss, and streaked with fine scratches, pointing down the hollows and far up the rocks on either side. During all these operations the great valley was probably filled up with ice, which would close Glen Gluoy and Glen Spean, and might also close the lowest of the lines in Glenroy. ”

“ Opposite, ‘in darkness visible,’ hangs the famous landscape of the Deluge by the same master-hand, a leaden weight on the walls with the ark ‘hulling’ on the distant flood, the sun labouring, wan and faint, up the sky, and the heavens, ‘blind with rain,’ pouring down their total cisterns on the weltering earth. Men and women and different animals are struggling with the wide-spread desolation ”

“ His picture of the Deluge is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You see a waste of waters, wide, interminable: the sun is labouring, wan and weary, up the sky; the clouds, dull and leaden, lie like a load upon the eye, and heaven and earth seem commingling into one confused mass! ”

“ Padna, who had been listening to the conversation of two farmers the evening before, replied, "I do. To make turnips grow."
"Nonsense!" said the shoemaker, reaching out for an awl. "God makes it rain to remind us of the Deluge. And I don't mean the Deluge that was at all at all. I mean the Deluge that is to come. The world will be drowned again. The belly-band of the sky will give, for that's what the rainbow is, and it only made of colours. Did you never know until now what the rainbow was? No? Well, well!... As I was saying, when the belly-band of the sky bursts the Deluge will come. ”

“ If we can save mankind now, and give it another chance, perhaps the time will come when power can be drawn out of the ether of space, and men can float in the air as long as they choose.
"But as things are now, we must go back to Noah's plan, and trust to the buoyant power of water. I fully expect that when the deluge begins people will flock to the high-lands and the mountains in air-ships—but alas! that won't save them. Remember what I have told you—this flood is going to be six miles deep!" ”

“ After the delta, the deluge, as a storm broke over us, giving the invaders of the hills their first, but not their last, nature bath. After the delta and the deluge, the initial bit of stiff up-grade climbing, of nearly a thousand feet, tested strength and breath. ”

“ The proofs of this great submergence, succeeding the era of “land-ice,” are constantly accumulating. Since 1863, when Professor Hull first divided the thick glacial deposits of Eastern Lancashire and Cheshire into an Upper Boulder Clay, and Lower Boulder Clay divided by a Middle Sand and Gravel, the whole of which are of marine origin, these subdivisions have been found to hold good, by himself and Mr. ”