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Updated: June 23, 2025
I think that we had to wait for Agassiz to show us that the "diluvial scratches" were really glacial abrasions, caused by the great glacier which came down the valley of the Hudson and went to sea off Sandy Hook.
And heavy and uphill was the work, even within the last fifteen years, of those who stedfastly set themselves to the task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the coal seam and the diluvial cave could not be a "Deus quidam deceptor," and that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the sake of any cowardly and hasty notion that they contradicted His other messages.
Moreover the Indian Ocean lies within the region of typhoons; and if, at the height of an inundation, a hurricane from the south-east swept up the Persian Gulf, driving its shallow waters upon the delta and damming back the outflow, perhaps for hundreds of miles up-stream, a diluvial catastrophe, fairly up to the mark of Hasisadra's, might easily result.
Thus it would seem that the Euphrates valley, the centre of the fabled Noachian deluge, is also the centre of a region covering some millions of square miles of the present continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, in which all the facts, relevant to the argument, at present known, converge to the conclusion that, since the miocene epoch, the essential features of its physical geography have remained unchanged; that it has neither been depressed below the sea, nor swept by diluvial waters since that time; and that the Chaldaean version of the legend of a flood in the Euphrates valley is, of all those which are extant, the only one which is even consistent with probability, since it depicts a local inundation, not more severe than one which might be brought about by a concurrence of favourable conditions at the present day; and which might probably have been more easily effected when the Persian Gulf extended farther north.
In the lowlands, after the annual floods, the natives dug and washed the diluvial deposits for the precious metal exactly as is now done upon the Gold Coast; and they burrowed into the highlands which surround in crescent-form the head-waters of the great River Joliba.
Professor Rogers takes the ground that human antiquity is not proven from these relics, for two reasons: First, because the indications in the deposits inclosing the flints point clearly to a "turbulent diluvial action," and therefore it is possible for a violent incursion of the ocean to have taken place in the historic period, and to have mixed up the more recent works of man with the previously buried bones or relics of a pre-historic period; and secondly, because the different geological deposits do not necessarily prove time, but only succession, two schools of geology interpreting all similar phenomena differently, as relating to the time required.
On the peninsula of Sabbioncello they lie partly in one and partly in the other direction. The former connection between the islands and the mainland is proved by the remains of rhinoceros, horse, and stag in the diluvial bone breccias of Lesina, and the survival of the jackal in Giuppana, Curzola, and Sabbioncello.
Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure.
"The clear, brilliant, Alpine sky of Embrun, of Gap, of Barcelonette, and of Digne, which for months is without a cloud, produces droughts interrupted only by diluvial rains like those of the tropics. The abuse of the right of pasturage and the felling of the woods have stripped the soil of all its grass and all its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the consistence of porphyry.
Its great features would undoubtedly be the works of man hewn stones, and statues of bronze and marble, and tools of iron and human remains would be more common than those of animals on the greatest part of the surface; the columns of Paestum or of Agrigentum, or the immense iron and granite bridges of the Thames, would offer a striking contrast to the bones of the crocodiles or sauri in the older rocks, or even to those of the mammoth or elephas primogenius in the diluvial strata.
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