Hence it ought to be evident that no amount of learned trifling with time will solve our problem without supposing some strange event to have happened our world and our race, long ago, and before the dawn of history. I see no possible way for scientific reasoning to avoid this conclusion. Ignoring for the present the Chaldean Deluge tablets, and what Rawlinson calls the "consentient belief" in a world-catastrophe "among members of all the great races into which ethnologists have divided mankind," which like their civilization has the earmarks of being =an inheritance= from some common source before their dispersion, we may note that most geologists now admit the certainty of some sort of catastrophe since man was upon the earth. I might mention Quatrefages and Dupont, Boyd Dawkins, Howorth, Prestwich, Wright and Sir William Dawson, with many others. Even Eduard Suess teaches a somewhat similar local catastrophe, though like the others only as a reluctant concession to the insistent demands of Chaldean history and archaeological tradition. But all of these affairs are mere makeshifts in view of the tremendous demands of the purely geological evidence, and all alike (save perhaps those of Wright and Howorth) labor under the strange inconsistency of supposing that such an event could occur without leaving abundant and indelible marks upon the rocks of our globe. While in view of the evidence given through the previous pages, I insist that the purely geological evidence of a world catastrophe is immeasurably stronger than that of archaeology, that in fact the whole geological phenomena constitute a cumulative argument of this nature. But if this be granted, we must then inquire, What was its nature? and what its extent? The former is quite easily answered: the latter problem is still somewhat beyond our reach. As to its character, the evidence is very plain. It was a veritable cataclysm of some sort: it deals with great changes of land and water surface. If the geological succession is but a hoary myth, and if we find countless modern living species of plants and animals mixed up in all the "older" rocks, we cannot ignore these in a rational and unprejudiced reconstruction of the science. But, ignoring these, we must remember that =even the Tertiary and post-Tertiary deposits are absolutely world wide, and are packed with fossils of living species=. Not a continent and scarcely a country on the globe but contains great stretches of these deposits, laid down by the sea where now the land is high and dry. The sea and land have practically shifted places over all the globe since Man and thousands of other living species left their fossils in the rocks. It is only the stupendous magnitude of these changes which has made our scientists reluctant to admit the possibility of such a catastrophe.