across the equator, to submerge our northern
hemisphere. The sea is to take repossession of
its ancient bed, which we now occupy and cultivate.
High grounds, rising above the level of
the Southern Ocean, are to form the archipelagoes
of a new Polynesia. Our hemisphere,
which is continental at the present day, is to
become what it was before the last catastrophe;
—oceanic, and vice versâ. In the southern
hemisphere, unknown continents are to spring
from the abyss, raising their summits to the
clouds, and are soon to be covered with what
is called eternal snow—that is, eternal until
the next oceanic revolution. In reality, the
mountains will not rise; but the effect will be to
all intents the same, by the retiring of the sea
from that half of the earth's surface. By the
depression of its level, the islands of the Pacific
will at once become the culminating points of
new chains of mountains. The continental
hemisphere will then lie on the other side of the
equator.

It was a similar disturbance of equilibrium,
Adhémar holds, which caused, "four thousand
two hundred and six years and nine months
ago," the preceding deluge, which is called
THE deluge, because it is the only one tradition
whereof subsists, and which, perhaps, is the
only one that has had human beings for
witnesses. All the general deluges are owing to
the same cause—the displacement of the seas.
M. Le Hon [whose Périodicité des Grands
Déluges is now lying before us], a learned
geologist and professor at the Military School
at Brussels, counts no less than fourteen such
deluges, from the beginning of the tertiary
period up to the present day. The oldest of
these tertiary deluges (before which there were
plenty of others) mounts as far back as a
hundred and forty thousand years. The only
difference between them is, that, in two
consecutive deluges, the irruption of the waters
takes place in an opposite direction; that is, from
south to north in one case, and from north to
south in the other. M. Le Hon is so sure of
his facts, that he favours us with a map of several
European, and some African and Asiatic, lands,
showing the degree to which they were
submerged—namely, what was water and what
dry land—during the interval between Noah's
flood and the preceding one. From this he
infers that the grand mass of ice surrounding
the North Pole reached, at the epoch of greatest
cold, very nearly as far as Tornea, or sixty-six
degrees of latitude; that the sites of most of
the principal cities of Europe—London, Paris,
Madrid, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam,
Brussels, Constantinople, Athens, Turin, Munich,
and many others—were all under water; that
Ireland was then a group of four separate
islands; England, of four likewise, divided
from Scotland by a strait; and that the Straits
of Dover, so far from being a new invention,
were very much wider than they are at present.
They were probably first opened at the last
deluge but one.

A very slight alteration in the position of the
earth's centre of gravity is quite sufficient to
produce these vast convulsions—vast relatively
to their effects on animated nature—so nice
is the equilibrium. For, the depths of the
ocean and the highest mountain-tops are so
trifling in comparison with the enormous size of
the globe, that Biot, as is well known, compared
them to the irregularities on the skin of an
orange. M. Adhémar has calculated the
comparative volume of a chain, or rather a considerable
group of mountains; and he finds that, if
we suppose the circumference of the globe to be
represented by an ordinary dinner plate, the
abdomen of a common house-fly will represent
the group of all the Alps united. The famous
chain of the Andes, the largest in the world,
appears enormous to an atom like man, but it
is in reality only a slight wrinkle, hardly equivalent
to the seventh part of our planet's
circumference. It is clear, then (to Adhémar), that if
anything occurs to shift the centre of gravity
only to a moderate distance, it will make all the
difference on the outspread waters between stable
and unstable equilibrium. Noah's flood was
caused by the sudden departure of the northern
seas, which rushed towards the Antarctic Pole;
Adhémar's will take place in the contrary
direction. The mass of the seas appears, therefore,
to be carried alternately from one side of
the equator to the other, nearly as a pendulum
in motion swings from one side of the
perpendicular to the other. Nothing can be simpler;
nothing is more natural—as the philosophers just
cited, profess to prove.

A glance at the map of the world informs us
that the mass of waters is very unequally
portioned out between the northern and the southern
halves of the globe. In the northern hemisphere,
the land bears to the sea the proportion of four
hundred and fifteen to one thousand; in the
southern, of one hundred and twenty-nine to
one thousand. If you follow the same parallel of
latitude—forty degrees, for instance—above and
below the equator, in the northern hemisphere
it passes close to Madrid, Constantinople, Pekin,
ana Philadelphia, and is almost entirely
continental; whilst, in the southern hemisphere, it is
almost entirely maritime; and, except Patagonia
and a few islands, there is nothing between it
and the pole, but ice and water. The fact is
too evident to require further comment. The
antarctic seas, four times vaster than those of
the north, are also deeper. At the points
nearest to the North Pole which have been
reached, the sounding line has never given more
than three hundred fathoms, whilst in the
opposite hemisphere it has marked two thousand
and more without touching bottom. Captain
Ross found four thousand; M. d'Archiac cites
a case in which the line, charged with a weight
of four hundred pounds, ran out to nine thousand
one hundred and forty-three mètres, or
about ten thousand yards, and only stopped for
want of rope. In this abyss, the Pyrenees,
Mont Blanc, and Ararat itself might be sunk,
without leaving a trace. Everest, the giant of
the Himalayas, measured by Colonel Waugh,