gs now extinct, how have
all these creatures been destroyed? That question, however, seemed to
present no difficulties. It was answered out of hand by the application
of an old idea. All down the centuries, whatever their varying phases of
cosmogonic thought, there had been ever present the idea that past times
were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the earth had been the
scene of awful catastrophes that have no parallel in "these degenerate
days." Naturally enough, this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic
speculation of whatever origin, was appealed to in explanation of the
destruction of these hitherto unimagined hosts, which now, thanks to
science, rose from their abysmal slumber as incontestable, but also as
silent and as thought-provocative, as Sphinx or pyramid. These ancient
hosts, it was said, have been exterminated at intervals of odd millions
of years by the recurrence of catastrophes of which the Mosaic deluge is
the latest, but perhaps not the last.

This explanation had fullest warrant of scientific authority. Cuvier had
prefaced his classical work with a speculative disquisition whose
very title (Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe) is ominous of
catastrophism, and whose text fully sustains the augury. And Buckland,
Cuvier's foremost follower across the Channel, had gone even beyond
the master, naming the work in which he described the Kirkdale fossils,
Reliquiae Diluvianae, or Proofs of a Universal Deluge.

Both these authorities supposed the creatures whose remains they studied
to have perished suddenly in the mighty flood whose awful current, as
they supposed, gouged out the modern valleys and hurled great blocks of
granite broadcast over the land. And they invoked similar floods for the
extermination of previous populations.

It is true these scientific citations had met with only qualified
approval at the time of their utterance, because then the conservative
majority of mankind did not concede that there had been a plurality of
populations or revolutions; but now that the belief in past geologic
ages had ceased to be a heresy, the recurring catastrophes of the great
paleontologists were accepted with acclaim. For the moment science and
tradition were at one, and there was a truce to controversy, except
indeed in those outlying skirmish-lines of thought whither news from
headquarters does not permeate till it has become ancient history at its
source.

The truce, however, was not for l