AN ARCHAIC SUBJECT.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume III, Issue 28, 4 August 1900, Page 1

AN ARCHAIC SUBJECT.

laughing-hyenas overboard to make room for a few refugees, but I told her it was against the Orders of the Board " Sunday, Dec. 10th. Began to make water somewhere abaft the snake-house, and sent the beaver over the side to look for the leak, Leak located. Sent the beaver's wife to plug it with her tail. N.B. shall carry beavers on all future voyages. " March 15th. The cattle in the forward hold have developed ' ticks.' Of course we had to take the ticks aboard — they were confined in a box with the bots and other pests — but Japhet's boy, Gonier, the curse of the ship, undid the lid, and let the ticks out. " March 16th. There was great trouble to day with the rattlesnakes anxl the cobras. The case for the female cobra was that the he-rattle-snake kept swallowing the young cobras as soon as they were hatched. In separating the comhMants Ham got'bitfced in the arm, but he has been drinking port wine and brandy ever since, and will pull through, " May 13th. To-day ' link * died and was buried at sea. " April Brd. A steam -pipe burst on the lower deck, where the tropical animals are kept, and Shem was badly scalded. Then something went wrong with the gear in the refrigerating-room, whfere bhe polar bears are. Troubles never come singly. The rebulfc is that all the animals from the tropics will have to be rugged, and the polar bears hosed frequently, till repairs are effected. " April^ 4lh. Saw the san for the first time to-day. Took an observation — 39-50 N., 44-03 E. Sent out the raven. " April 10th. The dove, which I liberated yesterday, returned fchip morning with an olive branch, but whether it was got from a hill -top or a floating tree, the bird didn't say. "April 12fch. Took another observation. Still 39-50 N., 41-33 E. Can't make things out, unless she has stuck fast on an uncharted shoal. Fortunately the weather is calm. " April 15th. Have called the mountain we have grounded on, Koh-i-Nub, — i.e., Noah's morntain. The ombarkation commences to-morrow. Expect to experience great difficulty in getting tb<3 hippopotami down the mountain. Tbe unanimous opinion is, that if the whole job bad to be done over again we'd jib, Board or no Board." ' And yet; many difficulties remain > unexplained. For instaiice, we know i that Australia was chopped off fiom ' the rest of the world more than . 4248 years ago ; its fau-na is unique; it contains~anima,ls and birds found nowhere else on earth ; it possesses « the champion jumpers, and these ' must have gone to Noah and got back again after the event. Yefc no one has ever explained how they » jumped Torres Straits and the Straits of Sunda. Maodland, too, possesses some distinct forma of life. The moa q was there very lately, and it must have been in the ark ; the taniwha, male and female, wore there ; and so was the tauiara lizard, that is never in a hurry. Once I saw a captive tautara that was trying to get across his cage. When I saw him first he had one foot in the air, in the act of taking a step. I was in hi 3 town a week, but he had not succeeded in getting his foot down when. I left. It -svas not till a fortnight; afterwards that I heard he had been successful id the effort. Of course his forbears , were in. the ark. What a time it ( must have taken to get to the Euphrates Valley, and they had to j be there on time, to the very tick, or they would have been left out in , the rain. Probably they started for the ark some thousands of joars before Noah was thought of — which goes to show that ,they are deeper thinkers than is even generally supposed, and probably they only recently got home again, ''"be tautara is said io be a long-lived lizard. He needs to be. And here, d«ar brethren, at this precise pointy endeth the first lesson, — Bulletin.

Somebody once said, " th© Dccasion always produces the man ; " but sometimes the man produces the occasion. Whether Noah produced the flood, or the flood produced Noah, is a conundrum I have never solved. I hava heard all that the parsons have to say on the subject, but I feel sceptical as ever. A parson is lik« a phonograph ; certain things are talked into him, and he talks them out again — on consideration that he may tak& up a collection afterwards. And it has struck me that if he were not a parson he would take up the collection beforehand, since a hungry man who has been given a brick to digest, is not in a generous frame of mind, The parson sticks to his book, which is emphatic and explicit. He says, without turning a hair, that this flood of his occurred exactly 4248 years ago; that it covered the tops of the highest mountains and had 15 cubits to spare— exactly 15 cubits; that ' representatives of all existing fauna congregated in Noah's valley, and that they came, some in pairs and others in fourteens, and filled up the ark. All animal life was represented on that marvellous craifc;^ every order, every species, every variety; nothing was forgotten ; not even the stink-bug. And they must have been considerably crowded in that ark, those hundreds of reptiles, those thousands of mammals, those tens of thousands of birds, those myriads of insects ; from the Arctic cold they came, from the Torrid Zone, from the temperate clime — and thore were only four men and a few women to look after them all, and feed them, and feed them on wnat ? J&o doubt Noah was given orders to take in stores for the voyage. He must have beeri* good at commissariat work. And then the flood began to rise, and the ark too. It was a very wet season, the decks were sloppy, and the ship laboured a good deal, and drifted like an | ocean liner whose propeller had dropped off. But fortunately the animals remained very quiet, and i when the elephants or the giraffes lost their footing, before they had found their sea-legs, Noah's patent padded stalls prevented any great damage. The "old man" remained on the bridge and never Hook his oil -skins off for forty days and forty nights, and had his meals taken up to him on a tray by the " missing link," who had been trained to act as steward. I have often thought that it would add greatly to the interest of the authoritative account if ill included extracts from Noah's log :— "Thursday, Nov 19feh. Strong gales from S.W*. with driving rain. Drifted past several peaks covered with refugees who hung out signals of distress. Maria suggested we should throw the swine and the (Continued on fourth page).