terial for an entire treatise. I may remark here,
as its most important geological peculiarity, that it was evidently a
_local_ convulsion. The object, that of destroying the human race and
the animal population of its peculiar centre of creation, the
preservation of specimens of these creatures in the ark, and the
physical requirements of the case, necessitate this conclusion, which
is now accepted by the best Biblical expositors,[103] and which
inflicts no violence on the terms of the record. Viewed in this light,
the phenomena recorded in the Bible, in connection with geological
probabilities, lead us to infer that the physical agencies evoked by
the divine power to destroy this ungodly race were a subsidence of the
region they inhabited, so as to admit the oceanic waters, and
extensive atmospherical disturbances connected with that subsidence,
and perhaps with the elevation of neighboring regions. In this case it
is possible that the Caspian Sea, which is now more than eighty feet
below the level of the ocean,[104] and which was probably much more
extensive then than at present, received much of the drainage of the
flood, and that the mud and sand deposits of this sea and the
adjoining desert plains, once manifestly a part of its bottom, conceal
any remains that exist of the antediluvian population. In connection
with this, it may be remarked that, in the book of Job, Eliphaz speaks
as if the locality of those wicked nations which existed before the
deluge was known and accessible in his time:

"Hast thou marked the ancient way
Which wicked men have trodden,
Who were seized [by the waters] in a moment,
And whose foundations a flood swept away?"

--Job xxii., 15.

On comparing this statement with the answer of Job in the 26th
chapter, verse 5th, it would seem that the ungodly antediluvians were
supposed to be still under the waters; a belief quite intelligible if
the Caspian, which, on the latest and most probable views of the
locality of the events of this book, was not very remote from the
residence of Job,[105] was supposed to mark the position of the
pre-Noachic population, as the Dead Sea afterward did that of the
cities of the plain. Some of the dates assigned to the book of Job
would, however, render it possible that this last catastrophe is that
to which _he_ refers:

"The _Rephaim_ tremble from beneath
The waters and their inhabitants.
Sheol is naked before him,
And destruction hath