d, quite securely
fastened. Talk about the Black-hole of Calcutta, why it was nothing to
this! What a scramble there must have been for that solitary window
and a mouthful of fresh air! Lions, tigers, jackals, hyaenas,
boa-constrictors, kangaroos, eagles, owls, bees, wasps, bluebottles,
with Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and their wives, all in one fierce
melee. But the contention for the precious vital air must, however
violent, have soon subsided: fifteen minutes would have settled them
all. Yet curiously enough the choking animals-suffered no appreciable
injury; by some occult means they were all preserved from harm; which
furnishes another illustration of the mysterious ways of God. What
powerful perfumes, too, must have arisen from all those animals! So
powerful indeed that even the rancid flavor of foxes and skunks must
have been undistinguishable from the blended scents of all their fellow
passengers. Those who have visited Wombwell's menagerie, or stood in
the monkey-house of the Zoological Gardens, doubtless retain a lively
recollection of olfactory disgust, even although in those places the
must scrupulous cleanliness is observed; but their experience of such
smells would have been totally eclipsed if they could but for a moment
have stood within Noah's ark amidst all its heterogeneous denizens.
However the patriarch and his sons managed to cleanse this worse than
Augean stable passes all understanding. And then what trampings they
must have had up and down those flights of stairs communicating with the
three storeys of the ark, in order to cast all the filth out of that one
window. No wonder their children afterwards began to build a tower of
Babel to reach unto heaven; it was quite natural that they should desire
plenty of steps, to mount, so as to gratify fully the itch of climbing
they had inherited from their parents.

5. Where did all the water come from? According to the Bible story the
waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days, and covered
all the high hills and mountains under the whole heaven. Now mount
Ararat itself, on which the Ark eventually rested, is seventeen thousand
feet high, and the utmost peaks of Himalaya are nearly twice as high
as that; and to cover the whole earth with water to such a tremendous
height would require an immense quantity of water; in fact, about eight
times as much as is contained in all the rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans
of our globe. Whence did all this