It may be remarked, by the way, that in taking objection to the opening sentence of the lecture, my friendly opponent seems to have misconceived its purport. ‘Darwinism implies,’ it says, ‘almost throughout, that no universal deluge has drowned our globe, either within the last ten thousand years, or even within a period indefinitely longer.’ Now, since certainly no Darwinian accepts the old views about the Deluge, this sentence could scarcely have been written for the benefit of Darwinians; and it would have been a very unsophisticated piece of rhetoric to say to a popular audience--‘Darwinism is true, so you see the old views about the Deluge are false,’ seeing that the popular audience might have disposed of the argument by the simple plan of interchanging the two adjectives. But the lecture opens with an acknowledgment that a recent universal deluge would be an argument sufficient to upset the Darwinian Theory, prior to showing that so important an objection to the theory is itself on numerous independent grounds untenable. Some arguments are equally in harmony with Darwinism, and inconsistent with the universality of the Noachian Flood. One of these is to be found in the existing diversities of the human race: but your correspondent appears to suppose that the element of time has nothing to do with the theory of development, when he says that ‘to represent the divergence of races as impossible in any given period, however short, is strange ground for a Darwinian to take up.’ He might as well require an engineer to believe that an engine had been driven at six hundred miles an hour, because the engineer himself believed it to have been driven at the rate of fifty or sixty. He only half states the argument against a common Noachian descent founded on the difference between the Papuans and the Malays. The striking point is, that these two contrasted races are separated by almost the very same line which separates two great zoological provinces. On the old supposition of migration from the ark, that the lower animals, as well as men, should have ‘agreed to differ’ on the opposite sides of a narrow deep-sea channel, was indeed a remarkable bundle of coincidences. That traditions of a deluge are wide-spread is acknowledged. That they are traditions of a universal deluge neither is nor can be proved. That with all their local variations and discrepancies they point to one and the same deluge, is a question of probability, much more proper to follow than to lead the main argument. We shall not gain much for science or religion out of the story of Deucalion’s flood, which attributes the origin of the new stock of men and women to the pebbles that Deucalion and his wife threw over their shoulders; an ancestry surely less dignified even than that from the orang-outang and the gorilla with which Mr. Pengelly and Professor Huxley are supposed to have mortified the dignity of mankind.