radish, cabbage, lettuce and plantain-seeds, and sometimes a few bruised melon-seeds or barberries." Nightingales, he says, should be fed on meal, worms, and fresh ants' eggs: but, if it is not possible to get these, a mixture of hard egg, ox-heart minced, and white bread may be given; but this often kills the birds. No such food would do for Noah's nightingales, then, or where would have been the nightingale's song? They must have been fed on meal, worms, and fresh ant's eggs. How they were obtained, we have, of course, no knowledge. Bechstein says that larks may be fed with "a paste made of grated carrot, white bread soaked in water, and barley or wheat meal, all worked together in a mortar. In addition to this paste, larks should be supplied with poppy-seed, bruised hemp, crumb of bread, and plenty of greens, such as lettuce, endive, cabbage, with a little lean meat or ant-eggs occasionally." He says the cage should be furnished with a piece of fresh turf, often renewed, and great attention should be paid to cleanliness. The care of the birds in the ark probably fell to the women. As they had not read Bechstein, or any other author on bird-keeping,—and thousands of the birds must have been total strangers to them,—how did they know what diet to supply them with, and where could they get it, supposing they had time to supply them at all?

If the difficulty was great to keep the birds of a temperate climate, how much greater must it have been to keep tropical birds in a climate altogether unsuited to them? The two birds of paradise bought by Wallace were fed, he says, on rice, bananas, and cockroaches: of the last, he obtained several cans from a bake-house at Malta, and thus got his paradise birds, by good fortune, to England. But how many cans of cockroaches would be necessary for two hundred and fifty-two of such birds,—the number in the ark? and where were the bake-houses from which the supply might be obtained?

To keep this vast menagerie clean would have required a large corps of efficient workers, especially when we remember that there was but one door in each story, as some suppose; or one door to the whole ark, as the story seems to teach, and this door was closed; and but one window, and that apparently in the roof. The Augean stable, the cleansing of which was one of the labors of Hercules, can but faintly indicate what must have been the condition of the ark in less than a month, supposing the animals to subsist as long.

Whence came the water that covered the earth to the tops of the highest mountains? "All the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered," says the record. And to do this, it rained for forty days and forty nights. A fall of an inch of water in a day is considered a very heavy rain in Great Britain. The heaviest single rain recorded fell on the Khasia Hills in India, and amounted to thirty inches in twenty-four hours. If this deluging rain could have continued for forty days and nights, and had it fallen over the entire surface of the globe, the amount would only have been one hundred feet; which, instead of covering the mountains, would not have covered the hills. But, of course, such a rain is only possible for a very limited time, and on a small portion of the earth's surface.

Sir John Leslie, in "The Encyclopedia Britannica," says, "Supposing the vast canopy of air, by some sudden change of internal constitution, at once to discharge its whole watery store, this precipitate would form a sheet of scarcely five inches thick over the surface of the globe." But if the water that covered the earth above the tops of the highest mountains came by rain, it must have rained seven hundred feet a day for forty days! or there must have fallen each day, according to Sir John Leslie's estimate, more than fourteen hundred times as much water on the earth as the atmosphere contained!

But the writer says, "The fountains of the great deep were broken up." To the Jews, who supposed, with David, that God had founded the earth upon the seas, and established it upon the floods, this meant something; but, in the light of geology, we see that it only demonstrates the ignorance of the man who wrote and the people that believed the story.

Adam Clarke, commenting on this passage, says, "It appears that an immense quantity of water occupied the centre of the antediluvian earth; and, as this burst forth by the order of God, the circumambient strata must sink in order to fill up the vacuum occasioned by the elevated waters." If true, it would not have assisted in drowning the world one spoonful. For if the strata sank anywhere to fill the hollow previously occupied by the water, it would only make the mountains so much higher in comparison: hence it would require just that much extra water to cover them. In the light of geology, however, the notion is sufficiently absurd. A mile and a half deep, the earth's interior is hot enough to convert water into steam; there is, therefore, no chance for water to exist in its centre, or anywhere near it.

It is as great a difficulty to discover where the water went when the flood was over. We are told that the fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain was restrained. But this could do nothing towards diminishing the water. All that it could possibly accomplish would be to prevent the rise of the water. But we are also told that "God made a wind to pass over the earth." All that the wind could do, however, would be to convey to the atmosphere the moisture it took up in vapor; and this could not have lowered the water a yard. The highest mountain, Kunchinginga, is more than twenty-eight thousand feet high; the flood prevailed one hundred and fifty days, and abated two hundred and twenty-five; and if this abatement was done by the wind, it must have blown an ocean of water from the entire surface of the earth, one hundred and twenty-five deep, every day for eight months! All the hurricanes that ever blew, blowing at once, would be the gentlest zephyr of a summer's eve, compared with such a wind as that; and by what possibility could such a craft as the ark survive the storm?

A question, proper to be asked is, How were the animals supplied with light? and how did the attendants see to wait upon them in the first and second stories of the ark? There was but one window, and that only twenty-two inches in size, and it appears to have been in the third story. It was a day when kerosene was unknown, and tallow dips were uninvented. How did these animals live in the darkness? and, above all, how did Noah and his family supply their wants? It could have been no easy or pleasant thing to wait upon hungry lions, tigers, crocodiles, and rattlesnakes in the dark, to say nothing of the danger.

How did they breathe? There was but one twenty-two inch window; the ark was "pitched within and without with pitch;" "The Lord shut him in." Talk of the Black Hole of Calcutta: it must have been pure as the breath of morning compared with the condition of the ark in one day.

Where did they obtain water for drink? Supposing all the additional water needed to drown the world was fresh, when mingled with the water of the sea, as much as one-tenth of it would be salt water, and this would render it utterly unfit for drink. Provision must therefore have been made for water; and a space certainly half as large as the ark must have been taken up for the water necessary for this immense multitude.

The fish, mollusks, crustaceans (such as our crabs and lobsters), and all corals, must have died if such a flood had taken place,—the fresh-water fish from the salt water at once added to their proper element, and the salt-water fish and other marine forms