encountered in the passage, the course would have been run in eleven days. As the wind blew almost a continued hurricane, very little sail was carried. The average of progress, was therefore two hundred and seventy-three miles in the twentyfour hours. On one day, the vessel actually ran ninety-six leagues, or two hundred and eighty-eight miles. Now, the distance from the equator to Tobolsk, in Siberia, is only four thousand miles; so that with the same velocity, uninterrupted, a floating mass might have been propelled from the former to the latter parallel in fifteen days. The mouth of the river Lena, is in the parallel nine hundred miles north of Tobolsk; or, four days further, with the same velocity of progress.

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As we have thus found a law, by which an advancing sea can float and convey bodies into the rear of its waters; and as we can therefore now see how elephants could have been brought into Siberia," and " why the current should have "taken a northern direction;" let us next consider, the natural consequence of such transport to the bodies, when brought, and at length deposited upon its bottom.

That bottom, consisting of the loose or fractured materials of the parts which had been depressed to form the bed, and which, during 1656 years, had been subjected to the mechanical and chemical action of the superincumbent sea, was in most parts penetrated by its water; and formed a deep and yielding paste of differing qua

lities, arenaceous, argillaceous, or calcareous. Many bodies would be buried in those pastes, by their own weight, or by the weight and ordinary action of the waters rolling over them. Others, would become profoundly immersed, by the peculiar power of the sea in the latter stages of its retreat; when the violent action of its surface would have been more strongly communicated to its bottom, in consequence of the increased and increasing shallowness of its depth: with diversity of circumstances, arising from various and unassignable local causes. To form a judgment of the amazing force of the sea whilst in violent action, and of its tendency and power to bury large bodies in its bottom, we have a very applicable example in the Bore, or the extraordinary high tide experienced at the mouth of the Amazon and other rivers of the east coast of America; of which potent agency, Condamine has given the following account from his own experience on the spot.

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Between Macapa and the North Cape, in "the place where the great canal of the Amazon "river is most confined by the islands, the tides

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present a singular phenomenon. During the "three days nearest the full and new moons (the "times of the high tides), the sea, instead of em

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ploying nearly six hours to rise, attains its

highest elevation in the space of one or two “minutes. It may be supposed, that this is not "effected very quietly: a terrific noise is heard "at the distance of one or two leagues, which

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announces the Pororoca (Barre or Bore); such "is the name which the Indians of the district

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give to this terrible tide. In proportion as it advances, the noise increases, and presently one beholds a promontory of water from twelve "to fifteen feet in height; then a second, then a "third, and often a fourth: which follow close

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upon each other, and which occupy the whole "breadth of the canal. This surge advances with a prodigious rapidity, breaking down, and shaving clean away, every thing that opposes it. I have, in some places, seen an extensive tract " of soil carried away by the Pororoca, trees of very large dimensions uprooted, and devastations of every description. Wherever it passes, "the coast is laid as smooth as if it had been intentionally and carefully swept'.".

Of the astonishing power of this aqueous agent to imbed large bodies, I hold the following instance from an eye-witness: "At the mouth of a river

in Nova Scotia, a schooner of thirty-two tons, "laden with live-stock, was lying with her side "to the tide at the influx of the Bore; which was

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then about ten feet in perpendicular height. "No sooner had this mass of water reached the vessel, than that great body was instantly "turned over, like a barrel, and presently disappeared. After the tide had ebbed, the schooner was so totally absorbed into the sand

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1 Voyage de la Rivière des Amazons, p. 189, 91.

"and ouze, that the taffel or upper rail of the deck

The

Thus, then, we find in the established order of things, physical powers capable, 1. of transporting the bodies of elephants, rhinoceri, &c., from the torrid zone to the north of Europe; and, 2. of imbedding them at all the various depths in which they are now found buried, in England or in Siberia: and this, without requiring any change, either in the natures of the animals, or the climates of the earth. certain knowledge, that an entire animal creation was once overwhelmed and destroyed by an advancing ocean, which, by its reflur, was able to transport in a contrary direction individuals of that creation of every climate, indiscriminately mingled together, accounts, with full satisfaction to the reason, for the discovery of the confused fragments of animals of all climates in the strata of our earth; and it evinces the incongruity of the assumption, that those animals must necessarily have died where their exuviæ are found, and therefore, the further incongruity of speculating, how they could all have lived there?

But, M. Cuvier, under the bias of his own ingenious but most fallacious theory, denies the fact of the transport of those bodies on the following argument; an argument, which does not appear eminent, either for the correctness of its logic or for its consistency.

"Those bones, (he says,) are almost every where found in beds nearly similar, namely

"of moveable soil, as sand or marl, and not very "far beneath the surface; we have no authentic "account that they are ever covered by regular

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layers of stone containing sea-shells, as if the sea "had continued a long time upon them in a settled " and tranquil state. The catastrophe which sunk "them, was therefore a great but transient inun"dation of the sea. The bones, are neither rolled “and triturated, nor united in entire skeletons, but

dispersed, and partly broken; they have, there'fore, not been brought by an inundation from a "distance, but were found by it on the places " where it covered them, as would have been the case if the animals to which they pertained had "inhabited those places, and had died in them. "Before this catastrophe, therefore, those animals "lived in the climates where their bones are now dug up; the northern parts of the globe, therefore, once nourished animals of the species of the elephant, hippopotamus, &c.""

Let us examine these several positions, and the conclusions. 1. "The bones have not been rolled "and triturated, in the inundation of the sea that "sunk them; therefore, they have not been trans"ported." But, if the animals had been transported on the surface of the water, and had afterwards been immediately deposited and immersed in a deep bed of sand or of some other soft and conservative sub

1 CUVIER, Ossemens Foss. tom. iv. p. 303-Géol. Disc.-JAMESON, p. 258. D'AUBUISSON, tom. ii. p. 513.