THE ARK AND THE DELUGE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 87, 4 September 1852, Page 8

THE ARK AND THE DELUGE.

(By Capt. Charles Knox.—Ollivier, London, 1852.) This is one of that desirable class of books which are at once instructive and suggestive, which convey positive information, and open to the reader such sources of speculation and enquiry as he may with advantage follow out for himself. The author is deeply impressed with the importance of that great event in the history of our planet which resulted in the destruction of nearly the whole human race inhabiting it. The subject he finds has been hitherto little investigated, and his object in these pages is to direct attention to it, to point out what may be learned from sacred history and other sources respecting it. and more especially to set forth certain deductions to be drawn thence. We shall not occupy the attention of our readers with preliminary observations; but having thus noted the scope and purpose of the book we will at once proceed to a few illustrative extracts. And first of THE DELUGE. Difficult as it may be to fix tre exact epoch of this wonderful event, all nations concur in the belief that it did take place. Traditions of a flood which swept the human race, with very few exceptions, from the face of the earth, have been traced alike amongst the Chaldjeans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Assyrians and Persians of times long since passed away, and the more recently discovered American Indians o f the North, and the Mexicans, the Peruvians, Brazilians, and islanders of the Pacific. Greek and Roman, Goth and Celt, Chinese and Hindoo, alike preserve the recollection of the mighty catastrophe, a universality of belief that goes far to confirm us in the conviction that the earth was indeed re-peopled by the family of Noah, and none other. With respect to the proportion of the surface of theearth affected by the Deluge, opinions are much divided The submergence of any considerable portion of Western Asia would be sufficient to fulfil the Divine intention. . . . . The physical causes of the Deluge are, and probably will for ever remain, unknown. We are told that the "foundations of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven opened;" and indeed, the sudden irruption of such a mass of water, between the 30th and 40th degrees of latitude, from the rapid reduction of temperature it must have caused, must have occasioned violent atmospheric disturbances. The simplest method of accounting for it would seem to be in the degradation and subsequent elevation of some thousand square miles of country, a process which has been going on since the very earliest periods, though generally much more slowly than in this instance. THE ARK. The cubit of Noah, the ordinary one of 18 inches, will give the ark a length of 450 feet, a breadth of 75, and a depth of 45. ... With respect to the shape of tnis colossal vessel, we must at once dismiss from our minds all preconceived ideas derived from pictures, or the perhaps, though unconsciously, still more deeply rooted impressions of our childhood from toys. Any one travelling by river or canal, in Germany or Holland, may see to this day, in the common river or canal boat of the country, the model which Dutch and German painters or toy-makers alike adopted when they •wished to represent the ark; but there is not in scripture the slightest authority for assuming that it was intended for progressive motion at all, and indeed it is wonderful how little it did move during lialf-a-year of exposure to the currents both of air and water incidental to such a violent convulsion of nature and such considerable changes of temperature, and consequent high winds, as muse have accompanied the Deluge. There is no reason therefore, to suppose that the ark was built as a ship, or indeed that Noah had any idea of naval architecture: we are told that it was an ark or chest. . . . Assuming then, that the cubit here mentioned was the smallest of which we have any knowledge, viz., eighteen inches, the ark was of the enormous measurement of 43,393 tons. Now, it is to be remembered, that the largest three decker, carrying 120 guns, with the numerous crew requisite fer sailing and fighting her, and often in addition a large body of troops, with the prodigious armament, equipment, stores, provisions and water requisite for such a multitude, rarely approaches, and still more rarely exceeds, 3,000 tons, that most of the largest vessels of war little exceed 2,000 tons of measurement, and the largest merchant ships are seldom more than 1,000 tons burden, and some idea may from these statements be formed of the enormous capacity of this vessel. . . . The ark was remarkable as to proportions, her length being six times her breadth ;• and that circumstance for four thousand years has been in the mouths of disbelievers of the Mosaic history an argument against the possibility of her floating, or resisting the heavy seas that must have accompanied such a

convulsion of nature- She was described as a weak fabric, of too great length to be safe, that she must infallibly have broken her back and gone down, and her proportions were ridiculed by those who had never known vessels built more than three and-a-quarter, or at most three and-a-half times as long as they were broad. But science, ever destined when read aright to confirm, not to confront Scripture, has of late years discovered that the proportions of the ark are the true proportions of seagoing vessels, and those large steamers which effect the communication between England and America, and indeed which connect the whole civilised world, are now built upon the proportions of the despised ark. DOES THE ARK STILL EXIST ? The whole country about (the present Mount Ararat) abounds with traditions about Noah and the Deluge. The Armenians call the mountain Massisseussar, or, the mountain of the Ark; the Persians Koh-i-Nuh, or, the mountain of Noah. It is a common belief in the neighbourhood that the ark still exists on the summit, the wood being converted into stone, a belief, the former part of which at least has a better foundation than might at first sight appear. . . The ark, it will be observed, " rested on the mountains of Ararat," comparatively early in the deluge, before, indeed, half the period of submergence was accomplished, and upwards of ten weeks before the " tops of the mountains became visible." It appears from this, that it must have taken the ground high upon the Upper Ararat, by far the loftiest mountain in the vicinity; and from the length of time which elapsed before the other mountains began to appear above the waters, we must infer that her final resting place was at an altitude great in itself, and considerably above the summit of the Lower Ararat, which did not become visible for more than two months. Now the summit of the Lower Ararat is covered with snow for the greater part of the year, though a partial clearance in summer serves as a guide to the inhabitants of the plains in their agricultural operations ; but the summit of the Upper Ararat, soaring to an elevation of more than 17,000 feet, is for thousands of feet above the limit of perpetual snow. At that low temperature all decay must have been instantaneously arrested; wood, frozen as hard and as cold as iron, must have remained unchanged and unchangeable under the dominion of the frost; even animal matter, as is evidenced by the winter markets in cold_ countries, will, once completely frozen, remain an indefinite time without corruption setting in: and. we have the most express assurance that the ordinary relations of seasons, temperature, and climate, were at once re-established upon the earth. " Ver. 22. While the earth remaineth, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, and summer.and winter, and day and night shall not cease. If, therefore, the Ararat of the present day be identical with the Ararat of Moses, which we have no sufficient reason to question, Noah must have left the ark at a period which most commentators agree to have been the beginning of winter, in a position almost, if not quite, inaccessible to man; thus comparatively secure from violent destruction, in a temperature which would render natural decay impossible. So that the simple belief of the Armenian peasants in the existence of the ark upon the mountains is based upon an immutable law of nature, though the vessel itself is probably buried under an accumulation of ice and snow that will for ever shroud it from the sight of man, unless indeed some such convulsion of nature as that, which, in 1840, amidst avalanches and fissures and landslips, detached huge masses of ice and snow from the summit and sides of the Arrarat, to spread ruin and desolation for miles around in the valleys beneath, should rend its icy prison asunder and reveal to the eyes of an astonished world this giant evidence of the truth of Scripture. We have only space to glance briefly at the author's chief deduction. Looking at the high state of civilization evidenced by the construction of the ark, he wishes to establish A HYPOTHESIS. It is possible, he says, that the fall may have involved a gradual withdrawal of the higher powers of the mind from the human race in general, a condemnation from which we are but slowly and partially emerging; so late as a thousand years after Noah, Jannes, Jambres, and Balaam offered instances of powers which we deem supernatural, belonging to men who were anything but set apart as special servants of the Almighty. Even now the extraordinary gifts we sometimes see in individuals will for a moment lift up the veil which conceals our own minds from ourselves, and give us a dark- ! ling and distinct idea of what the human intellect might be, if its every faculty were endowed with the highest perfection of which it is capable. We now find the earth with a population consisting of eight individuals only, those eight having proved themselves, by the most indisputable testimony, viz., by what they did or caused to be done, to be possessed of a very high degree of civilization, a fact which is deeply interesting in its bearings on the history of the human race, by shewing that the savage state, which so many considered as the aboriginal state of mankind, is far from being

so, but on the contrary, a degraded condition, and also that the high civilization of the ancient monarchies, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and perhaps we ought to add China, was not acquired by them after a course of barbarism, but preserved by them to the period of their appearance in history, and subsequently transmitted by them to nations which had partially lapsed into rudeness, a humiliating state of degradation fromj which we, with all our boasted civilization and the advantages of eighteen centuries of Christianity, have not yet thoroughly emerged.