of the district they inhabit, each occupying
in its preparation and execution the larger part of a year, produced me
only five species out of the fourteen known to exist in the New-Guinea
district." If it took Wallace, with all the assistance that he had from
various officials, five years to obtain five species, represented by
dead birds, how long did it take Noah's agents to obtain eighteen
species represented by two hundred and fifty-two live birds? Wallace
could only obtain two alive, and for these he had to pay five hundred
dollars.

If the antediluvian sinners were any thing like the modern ones, Noah
must have been richer than the Rothschilds, or he never could have
obtained their services; which he must have done, or it could never be
truthfully said, "according to all that God commanded him, so did he."

The collection of the land-snails alone would be no small tax.
Seventy-four are peculiar to Great Britain: hence there must have been a
hundred and forty-eight snails collected from that island. Six hundred
species are found in Southern Europe alone, and twelve hundred must have
been collected from there; eighty in Sicily, ten in Corsica, two hundred
and sixty-four in the Madeira Islands, a hundred and twenty in the
Canary Islands, twenty-six in St. Helena, sixty-three in Southern
Africa, eighty-eight in Madagascar, a hundred and twelve in Ceylon, a
hundred in New Zealand, and others on every large and some of the small
islands of the globe. The world must have been circumnavigated many
times before the vessel of Magellan was built, and every island visited
and ransacked ages before the time of Captain Cook. But it seems
surprising, since these voyages must have been performed by the sinful
antediluvians, that they did not save themselves in their ships when the
flood came; for vessels that could perform such voyages would certainly
have survived the flood more readily than the clumsy ark.

But was it really done? A thousand men in ten years, with all the
appliances of modern art,--steamboats, railroads, canals, coaches, and
express companies,--could not accomplish it in ten years; nor ten times
the number of men keep all the animals alive in one spot for one year,
if they were collected together.

"But," says the Christian, "Noah never did collect them: no intelligent
person in this day ever supposes that he did." What then? "The Bible
expressly declares that 'they went in unto Noah into the ark.' By
insti