But still further, we may compare the world of life before the Flood
with the world of life since. And here surely it needs not the genius
of Darwin or Lyell or Owen to perceive the conclusiveness of the
argument which their genius has pointed out and enforced. For instance,
where the marsupials now live, there lived marsupials in ages long
before Noah, as the fossil remains testify. The fossils are fossil
marsupials, but marsupials of species now extinct. So that the ‘door of
the ark’ theory requires us to believe that the marsupials found their
way to Australia, leaving no traces of their route on land, crossing
seas which they never subsequently recrossed, and planting themselves
precisely in that region which other marsupials, generically the same
but specifically different, had occupied before them.
We are to believe this of countless other species in all parts of the
world. We are to believe that they slowly and in many generations
worked their way back to these quasi-ancestral homes, and yet neglected
to occupy vast tracts equally or even better adapted to their wants.
We must believe also that some of the fleetest, strongest, and most
sagacious animals, as the horse and the elephant, failed to trace
out the abodes of their ancient representatives, since America, when
discovered a few years ago, possessed these quadrupeds only in fossil
and in no living species[20].
There is indeed one animal, whose powers of contrivance would account
for its distribution over the globe, even supposing it to have begun
with a single family, not more than 4300 years ago, and to have ranged
from a single centre. Man is that animal. Yet, if all the other
facts that bear on the universality of the Noachian Deluge were in
an agreement with it as entire as their irreconcileability is utter
and complete, still the circumstances of the human race alone would
disable us from believing that the Flood of Noah’s epoch extended
over all the globe. With other animals it might be advanced that the
different species and main varieties had been represented in the ark
and were thence disseminated; but in the case of man we are precluded
from such an explanatory device by the express terms of the diluvian
record. If the Noachian Flood was universal, then from Noah alone
must be descended all the races of man now upon the earth: all the
great and curious variations they display must have been evolved, not
in countless generations as Darwinism supposes, but in some two or
three hundred or less. From Noah alone must have sprung within a mere
handful of centuries races so widely unlike one another as Greeks
and Negroes, Jews and Egyptians, Saxons and Ojibbeways, Caffirs and
Hottentots, Fuegians and Patagonians, Californians and Chinese, Arabs
and Esquimaux. In the same archipelago we have the Malay, the Papuan,
and the dwarf snub-nosed Negrito. To give the contrast between the
two former in the words of Mr. Wallace[21]:--‘The Malay is of short
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