If the summits,
even of the moderately elevated ridges which immediately bound
the valley, still more those of the Kurdish and Armenian
mountains, were ever covered by water, for even forty days, that
water must have extended over the whole earth. If the earth was
thus covered, anywhere between 4000 and 5000 years ago, or, at
any other time, since the higher terrestrial animals came into
existence, they must have been destroyed from the whole face of
it, as the Pentateuchal account declares they were three several
times (Genesis vii. 21, 22, 23), in language which cannot be
made more emphatic, or more solemn, than it is; and the present
population must consist of the descendants of emigrants from the
ark. And, if that is the case, then, as has often been pointed
out, the sloths of the Brazilian forests, the kangaroos of
Australia, the great tortoises of the Galapagos islands, must
have respectively hobbled, hopped, and crawled over many
thousand miles of land and sea from "Ararat" to their present
habitations. Thus, the unquestionable facts of the geographical
distribution of recent land animals, alone, form an insuperable
obstacle to the acceptance of the assertion that the kinds of
animals composing the present terrestrial fauna have been, at
any time, universally destroyed in the way described in
the Pentateuch.
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