C. 4004 as
the date of Adam's too brief residence in that locality.
But I am far from depending on this authority for the age of the
Mesopotamian plain. On the contrary, I venture to rely, with
much more confidence, on another kind of evidence, which tends
to show that the age of the great rivers must be carried back to
a date earlier than that at which our ingenuous youth is
instructed that the earth came into existence. For, the alluvial
deposit having been brought down by the rivers, they must needs
be older than the plain it forms, as navvies must needs antecede
the embankment painfully built up by the contents of their
wheel-barrows. For thousands of years, heat and cold, rain,
snow, and frost, the scrubbing of glaciers, and the scouring of
torrents laden with sand and gravel, have been wearing down the
rocks of the upper basins of the rivers, over an area of many
thousand square miles; and these materials, ground to fine
powder in the course of their long journey, have slowly
subsided, as the water which carried them spread out and lost
its velocity in the sea. It is because this process is still
going on that the shore of the delta constantly encroaches on
the head of the gulf<5> into which the two rivers are constantly
throwing the waste of Armenia and of Kurdistan.
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